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THE PRESENT SOUTH 



^nM^ 



PROBLEMS OF 
THE PRESENT SOUTH 



A DISCUSSION OF 

CERTAIN OF THE EDUCATIONAL, INDUSTRIAL 

AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN THE 

SOUTHERN STATES 



BY 



EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1904 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1904, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1904. Reprinted 
June, 1904. 



. — ^ BEqUEST 

Rt. REV. JULtUB W. ATWO0P 

JUNE 5. '-•"'' 



NortoooB JPk08 

J. S. CusWng & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



Eo Mv Sons 



DU BOSE AND GARDNER 
MURPHY 



PREFACE 

With two exceptions, the papers here included 
have been prepared for this vokime and have not 
heretofore appeared in print. Even in these excep- 
tional instances the chapters have attained only a 
small private circulation, and they are here presented 
in a somewhat altered form. While, therefore, the 
volume is thus so largely and so directly representa- 
tive of matter that has not before found its way to 
print, I am aware that certain repetitions will be 
noted. These are chiefly due to the fact that the 
book has but one essential theme, and that each 
chapter is an attempt — from a somewhat different 
point of view — to discuss this one subject. The 
volume is an effort to contribute, from a standpoint 
within the life and thought of the South, to the 
discussion of the rise of democratic conditions in our 
Southern States. The problems of the South — in- 
dustrial, educational, political — appear as phases of 
the essential movement toward a genuinely demo- 
cratic order. 

The limitations of space have made it necessary 
to postpone the discussion of some of the topics 
which it seemed desirable to include. Chapters 
upon "The Negro Tax and the Negro School," — 
a more explicit discussion of the proposal to accord 
to the negro schools only the amount collected from 



viii PREFACE 

negro taxes ; " The South and the Amendments," — 
a criticism of the proposal to enforce the terms of 
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by Con- 
gressional action ; " The Broader Emancipation," — 
a more definite study of the progress of the negro 
since the Civil War ; " Commerce and the Common 
Schools," — a discussion of the direct relation of 
public education to the general economic efficiency 
of the people ; these, and a number of chapters 
dealing with some of the less familiar phases of our 
social and political development, may possibly find 
place in a later volume. 

The chapters just named, as well as those here 
pubHshed, have been written — as already suggested 
— from within the life and thought of the South, 
They assume, however, no representative finality. 
They are not intended as an authoritative interpre- 
tation of Southern opinion. Their essential conclu- 
sions will be rejected by some forces within the South 
and accepted by others. Their service — if they are 
to prove of service at all — will be found, however, 
not in the immediate evidences of agreement or dis- 
agreement, but in such contributions as they may 
offer toward that slowly forming, collective verdict, 
in reference to Southern issues, in which the public 
opinion of our whole country, North and South, will 
gain at length its rational and articulate expression. 
Popular judgments, operative as living social forces 
upon a large and inclusive scale, act and react upon 
the national character. To contribute, however in- 
adequately or imperfectly, to their formation is a 
legitimate and honorable interest. 

This volume offers, moreover, no dogmatic " solu- 



PREFACE ix 

tion " of the problems with which it deals ; least of 
all have I ventured to engage in the familiar occu- 
pation of " solving the negro question." The great 
problems of life are never solved in any mathe- 
matical or final sense. They are solved only in the 
sense that life becomes adjusted to them, or in the 
sense that their conflicting or complementary ele- 
ments find a working adjustment to one another, an 
adjustment consistent, in larger and larger measure, 
with wisdom, right, happiness ; but always coinci- 
dent with the possibility of misconception and with 
recurrent periods of acute antagonism. The prob- 
lems of racial cleavage, like the problems of labor 
and capital, or the problems of science and religion, 
yield to no precise formulas ; they are problems of 
life, persistent and irreducible. And yet they are 
subject to approximate adjustments, increasingly 
righteous, intelligent, and effective, and yielding an 
increasing measure of social peace, of industrial co- 
operation, of individual freedom and happiness. It 
is in this sense that the word " solution " is employed 
in the pages which follow. Toward the establish- 
ment of such a working adjustment of the factors 
of any national problem it is well to labor, in order 
that the problems of American life may become the 
occasions of a keener and more widely distributed 
sense of social obligation, a larger and saner political 
temper, a purer civic devotion, rather than the occa- 
sions of national demorahzation. 

While, therefore, these chapters are written from 
within the South, written by one who through birth, 
education, training, has shared its traditions and its 
experience, they have been written within the national 



X PREFACE 

perspective. More than once I have expressed the 

conviction that, in a certain local and palpable sense, 

the peculiar problems of the South are sectional in 

their form. And yet such a view is in no way 

inconsistent with the contention that the time has 

now come when every problem of every section of 

our country is to be conceived in the terms of the 

Nation's life. 

E. G. M. 

Montgomery, Alabama, 
March 5th, A.D. 1904, 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Old in the New i 

CHAPTER n 
The Schools of the People 29 

CHAPTER HI 
A Constructive Statesmanship 51 

CHAPTER IV 
The Industrial Revival and Child Labor . . 95 

CHAPTER V 
Child Labor and the Industrial South . . .127 

CHAPTER VI 
The South and the Negro 151 

CHAPTER VII 
A Narrative of Cooperation 203 

CHAPTER VIII 
Culture and Democracy 251 

Appendices 289 



XI 



THE OLD IN THE NEW 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 

CHAPTER I 

THE OLD IN THE NEW 

In the year 1865, at the close of the final catas- 
trophe of the Southern arms, the following declaration 
was made in London, England, by the late T. H. 
Huxley. Mr. Huxley, man of science and man of 
letters, speaks as one in detachment from the local 
and partisan passions of the long controversy, but 
also as one who is, upon the whole, in sympathy with 
the contention of the North. His words have specific 
reference to the issue of emancipation. 

"The question," he observes, "is settled; but even 
those who are most thoroughly convinced that the 
doom is just must see good grounds for repudiating 
half the arguments which have been employed by the 
winning side, and for doubting whether its ultimate 
results will embody the hopes of the victors, though 
they may more than realize the fears of the van- 
quished. It may be quite true that some negroes are 
better than some white men ; but no rational man, 
cognizant of the facts, beheves that the average negro 
is the equal, still less the superior, of the average 
white man. . . . 

" But," continues Mr. Huxley, "whatever the posi- 
tion of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social 

3 



4 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for 
the result will henceforth lie between Nature and him. 
The white man may wash his hands of it, and the 
Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for ever- 
more. And this, if we look to the bottom of the 
matter, is the real justification for the abolition 
policy." ^ 

It seems difficult to escape the conclusion that, 
in Mr. Huxley's thought, the policy of emancipation 
represented the rejection, rather than the expression, 
of responsibility. The negro was to be freed from 
slavery in order that the Caucasian might be freed 
from obligation. 

One is amazed to realize that an Englishman of 
such varied learning and of such masterful acumen 
should have had so imperfect a perception of the 
essential temper of American life. The issue of 
emancipation carried no such significance to the 
North. It bore no such significance to the South. 

The broader heart and the higher conscience of 
Southern life have often found utterance in the deci- 
sions of Southern courts, and in the declarations of 
press and pulpit. These expressions have repre- 
sented, especially, the slaveholding class, the class 
which had been most directly involved by the policy 
of emancipation, and the class, therefore, which might 
have been expected to cherish an attitude of deliberate 
irresponsibility. Yet, in striking contrast with Pro- 
fessor Huxley's words, are the following paragraphs 

IT. H. Huxley, " Emancipation — Black and White" (1865), in 
" Science and Education," pp. 66, 67, D. Appleton cS: Co., New York. 
Mr. Huxley included the address, unchanged, in the latest edition of 
his works. 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 5 

from one of the most intensely Southern of Southern 
publicists, one high in the counsels of the Confeder- 
acy, an ex-slaveholder, a veteran both of the Mexican 
War and of the War between the States, — all in all, 
perhaps, in these recent years, the most typical repre- 
sentative of the old South. It was at Montgomery, 
Alabama, — the first capital of the Confederacy, — that 
the late J. L. M. Curry addressed these words to a 
Southern audience on the evening of May 9, 1900. 

"We have heard much already," said he, "and 
will hear more before we adjourn, of slavery. It was 
an economic curse, a legacy of ignorance. 

" It cursed the South with stupid, ignorant, unin- 
ventive labor. The curse in large degree remains. 
The policy of some would perpetuate it and give a 
system of serfdom, degrading to the negro, corrupt- 
ing to the employer. The negro is a valuable laborer ; 
let us improve him and make his labor more intelli- 
gent, more skilled, more productive. . . . Shall the 
Caucasian race, in timid fearfulness, in cowardly 
injustice, wrong an inferior race, put obstacles to its 
progress .-' Left to itself, away from the elevating 
influence of contact and tuition, there will be retro- 
gression. Shall we hasten the retrogression, shall 
we have two races side by side, equal in political 
privileges, one educated, the other ignorant .-' Unless 
the white people, the superior, the cultivated race, lift 
up the lower, both will be inevitably dragged down. 

" Look at these roses on this platform. They 
have been developed from an inferior plant by skilled 
culture into gorgeous American Beauties. So it is 
with other flowers and fruits ; so with animals, and 
so it is with men. Eight hundred years ago our 



6 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ancestors were pirates, careless of laws, either of 
God or man, and yet by culture and education, and 
discipline and free institutions and liberty of worship, 
they have been made the people that they are to-day. 
God's throne is justice and right and truth. Unseat 
Him from that throne and he becomes a demon ; and 
so will sink our Southern civilization into infamy if 
we are guilty of crudest injustice to an inferior race, 
whom God has put into our hands as trustees for 
their elevation and improvement, and for His glory." ^ 
As I heard Dr. Curry's words, I do not know 
which was the more inspiring, the moral virility with 
which he spoke, or the earnest and impassioned ap- 
proval with which his audience responded to his mes- 
sage. For the words were as typical as the man. 
They were not an exceptional declaration. Such 
words from Curry, and from others like him, had long 
been familiar to Southern ears. There was not a 
Southern legislature to which Curry himself — by 
special invitation — had not brought a like appeal 
again and yet again. There was always something 
leonine in the regal and commanding power with 
which his eye flashed his instinctive scorn of wrong, 
and with which his voice thundered the realities of 
that moral obligation which binds the strong man to 
the weak. There was something deeply veracious, 
something restorative of one's essential confidence in 
life, to note that the highest appeal to the people 
whom he addressed was always followed by the most 
spontaneous and most serious tribute of applause. 

1 See Report of the Conference of the Society for the Consideration 
of the Race Problems and Conditions of the South, published by the 
B. F. Johnson Publishing Company, Richmond, Virginia, pp. 1 12, 1 13. 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 7 

The measure of the Southern conscience cannot be 
taken from the expressions that have sometimes 
greeted an unintelligent censure from without. It is 
only when a people, united by a common suffering 
and bearing a common burden, are overheard in their 
converse with one another, it is only when the South 
speaks freely to the South, that one may catch that 
real spirit of noblesse oblige which has so largely 
dominated the development of Southern life. It is 
one of the incredibilities of history that in the world's 
discussions of the South the occasional victories of 
impatience should loom so large, and that the South's 
far greater victories of magnanimity should loom so 
small. There is, indeed, nothing more characteristic 
of the Southern temper — whatever the suggestion 
of Mr. Huxley's inference — than that deep note of 
responsibility which sounds through Dr. Curry's 
words. The sense of responsibility may express 
itself wisely or mistakenly, perversely or construc- 
tively, but whatever the form of its expression, the 
consciousness of obligation is not absent. 

It is, therefore, by no accident of language that this 
sense of responsibility, as expressed in the words just 
quoted, should define, under certain characteristic 
assumptions, the poHcy of the South in reference to 
the negro. There is a distinct assumption of the 
negro's inferiority ; but there is also a distinct as- 
sumption of the negro's improvability. It is upon 
the basis of this double assumption that the South 
finds its obligation. If the negro were not peculiarly 
in need of progress, or if the negro were utterly in- 
capable of progress, the problem of his progress 
could bring no especial burden to the South. Recog- 



8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

nizing the double fact, first the fact of the negro's 
need and then the fact of the negro's promise, the 
South, as suggested in our quotation, has conceived 
her responsibihty both as a pohcy of supreme self- 
interest and as an obligation of Christian stewardship. 

This sense of responsibility is the present residuum 
of the moral forces of the old South. It is a natural 
and legitimate development. It was under slavery 
that men learned the oppressive significance of the 
negro's heritage from barbarism. It was under slav- 
ery that men first learned the presence of those latent 
capacities by which the negro has so often tran- 
scended the limitations of that heritage. It was 
through the bond of slavery that the wiser South was 
taught, in the light of an immediate self-interest, the 
advantage to the white man in the negro's integrity 
and skill, — the disadvantage, indeed the peril, to 
the white man in the negro's inefficiency and vice. 
Finally, it was through this bond of slavery that the 
truer South was taught, in the countless daily appeals 
of the negro's absolute dependence, — the appeal of 
ignorance to knowledge, of weakness to strength, of 
suffering to a sympathetic and interested power — 
the spirit of that tender and generous paternalism 
which so often made the master a sort of feudal 
providence to those in servitude. 

If the rigors of slavery made it a system of bond- 
age to the negro, its responsibilities made it also a 
system of bondage to the master. There were many 
men to whom these responsibilities brought moral dis- 
aster, men who abused authorities which were so much 
greater than flesh and blood should wield. There 
were other men, however, whose genius, half domestic 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 9 

and half executive, set the ideal of the institution, 
and as controversy gathered about the institution 
they became the more sensitively jealous of this ideal 
— holding it up to themselves and to one another, 
and attempting, ever the more seriously as the quarrel 
raged, to discharge its responsibilities, and to justify, 
by a broader solicitude and a more considerate kindli- 
ness, the awful prerogatives of the master. Yet the 
issue of this struggle was, to many, but a heavy 
and saddened heart. The burden was too great, and 
emancipation brought a quick sense of inexpressible 
relief. Emancipation did not, however, remove the 
negro. The negro remained and the white man 
remained. Their proximity to each other was as palpa- 
ble, as inevitable, as ever. The burden was lightened, 
was altered in its form, but the fact of responsibility 
continued, and the ideal of responsibiUty could not 
perish. The appeal of the weak still came up to 
the hearts of the strong. The crude necessities of the 
ignorant and the helpless still asked an answer. The 
habitual directions of moral interest are not easily 
overcome, and the strong custom of a protective and 
directive oversight still bound the white man to the 
fortunes of his humbler fellows. 

At this point in the new development of the rela- 
tionship between the races, and across the many lines 
of its promise, — its promise to the negro and to the 
peace of the South, — there crashed the congres- 
sional policies of reconstruction. I enter here upon 
no criticism of these policies in detail. I pause only 
to point out their direct effect upon that sense of 
responsibility to which slavery had contributed. The 
policies of reconstruction represented two cardinal 



lo THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

movements of purpose. One was the withdrawal of 
political and civic power from those, especially those 
in official position, who had borne arms against the 
United States. This effort was an expedient of dis- 
trust. It was as natural as it was unintelligent, and 
it was as successful as it was mischievous. Those 
who had borne arms, especially those in positions 
of responsibility, were largely the slaveholding class, 
the representatives of the aristocracy, the men who 
were the heirs of the broader and nobler traditions 
of the South. They were most generously disposed 
toward the freedmen. They were most scrupulously 
faithful to the terms of their surrender. They, like 
men, had fought it out; and they, like men, had 
accepted the verdict in containment, if not in full 
content The measures of reconstruction took power 
from them, leaving power in the hands of the young 
and the irresponsible. When these men came to 
their throne and faced the presence of the negro, it 
was as though a Pharaoh had arisen who knew not 
Joseph. It was from their ranks that the more vio- 
lent measures of the Ku-Klux Klan too often gained 
support. Nor had they faced the bitter realities of 
war. They knew not therefore, they could not know, 
the cost and the worth of peace. 

The old South was the real nucleus of the new 
nationalism. The old South, or in a more general 
sense the South of responsibility, the men of family, 
the planter class, the official soldiery, or (if you 
please) the aristocracy, — the South that had had 
power, and to whom power had taught those truths 
of life, those dignities and fidelities of temper, which 
power always teaches men, — this older South was 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW H 

the true basis of an enduring peace between the 
sections and between the races. But a doubt was 
put upon its word given at Appomattox. Its repre- 
sentatives were subjected to disfranchisement. Power 
was struck from its hands. Its sense of responsi- 
bility was wounded and confused. 

This was not all. The suffrage which the masters 
were denied was by the same act committed into the 
hands of their former slaves, vast dumb multitudes, 
more helpless with power than without power. Men 
from afar, under whose auspices this new preroga- 
tive was bestowed, were present to instruct them, 
not in fitness for it, but in its apt and grateful use. 
The negro masses, upon the suffrage as a basis, were 
reorganized out of their old economic and human 
dependence upon their masters of the past, into a 
formal political dependence upon the vague and 
beneficent authority which had freed them. I write 
primarily, not in order to accuse, but in order that 
we may understand. 

The effect of the new alliance of the freedmen, the 
effect upon their own relation to the pohtical reor- 
ganization of Southern society, must be evident 
The strong and effective forces which had secured 
this new alignment were soon withdrawn. The 
actual reorganization of the South was left, as was 
inevitable, to the resident forces of Southern life. 
The new allies of the freedmen could not share in 
so short a time that identity of interest in the soil, 
in the intimate fortunes of the South, which the 
negro had once felt. The agents of reconstruction 
who remained were just strong enough to modify 
this feeling in the negro, to make the negro distrust 



12 THE PRESENT SOUTH CHAP. 

the South and to make the South distrust the negro. 
They were not strong enough seriously to contribute, 
or to aid the negro in contributing, to the rebuilding 
of the political commonwealth. With the checking 
and the confusion of their sense of responsibility 
toward the blacks, it is therefore not unnatural that 
the negro's older allies should have omitted him from 
even a humble partnership in the task of rehabilita- 
tion. To the consciousness of the South, engaged 
in a desperate struggle for unification and for reinte- 
gration, the ballot of the black man thus unfortu- 
nately represented not only a negro suffrage, not only 
an incompetent suffrage, but an alien suffrage. 

The political reorganization which was proceeding 
was all the more difficult because the South was just 
entering, by pain and sacrifice, into the crucial move- 
ment of the century. The historian of institutions 
must perceive that the real struggle of the South from 
the date of Lee's surrender — through all the accidents 
of political and industrial revolution — was simply 
a struggle toward the creation of democratic con- 
ditions. The real thing, in the unfolding of the later 
South, is the arrival of the common man. Southern 
development is, in its essence, but an approach to 
democracy, to democracy not merely as a theory of 
administration, but as an expression of society itself. 

The thinking and responsible life of the South, as 
we have seen, had been an aristocracy. We may 
note the fact without criticism, for it was inevitable. 
We may note its passing without regret, because its 
passing was the deeper emancipation — an emancipa- 
tion which is bringing to the South a richer and 
larger life than the older age, with all its charm and 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 13 

fulness, could have dreamed. Yet men have often 
failed to realize the drastic conditions of reorganiza- 
tion into which Southern experience was compelled, 
both by the issue of the Civil War and by the federal 
policies which followed. It was nothing less than 
the reconstitution of an aristocratic society under 
democratic conditions. The change was inevitable, 
but the effort Xo force the change, to create it "over- 
night," to take an aristocratic civilization and to ham- 
mer it into another shape between sundown and sunup, 
to create republican institutions by military power, to 
inaugurate freedom by force and a democracy by 
martial law, was — in the nature of the case — impos- 
sible. And for two reasons. Democracy is a thing 
of growth and not of fiat ; and democracy, of all the 
forms of governmental or constitutional life, is the 
very form which cannot be nailed on from outside. 
It is by its very essence a form of government pro- 
ceeding from within. It is an instinct of life before 
it is an organization of society. Because democracy 
is an institution of freedom, the very effort to force 
democracy is its denial and subversion. There has, 
therefore, never been a cruder oligarchy than that 
represented by the reconstruction governments of the 
Southern States. 

Yet, under all the conditions of the new order, the 
movement toward democracy — however thwarted or 
embarrassed — made gradual progress. Civilization 
must be reattempted, society must become a coherent 
and stable force; life, liberty, and property cried out for 
government. The only existent forms of government 
were democratic. Democracy was the assumption of 
civilization ; and therefore the thought and purpose 



14 THE PRESENT SOUTH CHAP. 

of the South attempted their own reorganization under 
the new conditions. The aristocracy, however, could 
no longer stand alone. It could not express itself, it 
could give neither currency nor efficiency to its con- 
ceptions, it could not create government nor adminis- 
ter laws, except by some deeper alliance with human 
numbers. The aristocracy could furnish leadership, 
but the people must furnish votes. 

There were but two quarters from which the vol- 
ume of cooperation could be increased. The older 
civilization had contained two great classes of " non- 
participants." First were the slaves. We have seen 
the working of the forces and the rise of the condi- 
tions which made it unnatural and impossible for the 
aristocracy — still, as yet, the leaders of the new 
order — to turn for cooperation to the blacks. The 
removal of their own civil disabilities had not made 
the leaders of the aristocracy forget. Nor had the 
negroes themselves forgotten either their natural 
gratitude to their new masters or their unnatural 
suspicion of the old. In the movement toward 
democracy, in spite of whatever theoretic inconsist- 
ency, the conditions thus made it impossible to 
include the blacks. 

In the older civilization, the other class of non- 
participants were the non-slaveholding white men. 
I use the term non-participants in what is, of course, 
a broad and general sense, a sense in which I have 
employed many of the expressions of this chapter. 
Non-participants they were, but some of them were 
men of wealth and influence. As a class, however, 
the non-slaveholding white men had been outside 
the essential councils of the South. Many of them 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 15 

voted ; some of them, through sheer personal distinc- 
tion, had entered the ranks of the privileged, but as 
a whole they stood aloof ; they were supposed to fol- 
low where others led ; they might furnish the ballots, 
but the " superior " class was supposed to provide the 
candidates for important office. There was no inti- 
mate or cordial alliance between their forces and the 
forces of the aristocracy. Multitudes of them were 
left wholly illiterate. White illiteracy at the South 
long antedates the Civil War. In i860, less than 
I per cent of the adult native white population of 
Massachusetts were illiterate ; in Pennsylvania, less 
than 3 per cent ; in Connecticut, less than i per cent ; 
in New York, less than 2 per cent : but of the adult 
native white population of Virginia, in i860, more 
than 14 per cent could not read and write ; in Ten- 
nessee, more than 16 per cent; in North Carolina, 
more than 21 per cent.^ To the white non-partici- 
pants of the older civilization the aristocracy turned 
instinctively, however, in its reorganization of the 

1 This striking contrast between the civihzations of the North and 
the South is largely due to the historic difierence in the attitude of the 
respective sections toward the education of the masses. Says James 
Bryce, " In old colonial days, when the English Commissioners for 
Foreign Plantations asked for information on the subject of educa- 
tion from the governors of Virginia and Connecticut, the former re- 
plied, ' I thank God there are no free schools or printing-presses, and 
I hope we shall not have any these hundred years ; ' and the latter, 
' One-fourth of the annual revenue of the colony is laid out in main- 
taining free schools for the education of our children.' " — " The 
American Commonwealth," Third Ed., Vol. I, Chap. XLIX, p. 618. 
Thomas Jefferson, in his effort to secure the foundation of public 
schools in Virginia, points, in vigorous fashion, to the contrast between 
the policy of Virginia and the liberal policy of New York. See Letter 
to John Cabell, Washington Edition of Jefferson, Vol. VII, pp. 186, 
188; Ford Ed., Vol. X, pp. 165, 167. 



i6 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

South. The alienation of the negro and the menace 
of negro power not only eliminated the negro from 
the attempted reorganization of government, but 
operated also as a constraining force to draw to- 
gether the separate classes of the stronger race, and 
to fuse them — men of ignorance with men of culture 
— into a racial unity far more powerful, far more 
effective, than the South had known before. 

Politically, industrially, and I had almost said 
socially, this fusion is now practically complete. 
Still there are, in the white population, large numbers 
of the illiterate ; but in the distribution of political 
and industrial responsibilities the South knows no 
longer the old distinctions of clan and class. The 
line of illiteracy is now local rather than social. It is 
a phenomenon conspicuous in rural localities, con- 
spicuous nowhere in the cities. The democratizing 
of the South has assimilated within its progress all 
the classes and factions of its white people. The 
aristocracy exists no longer as a distinct political or 
industrial force. The expanding and enlarging life 
of democracy has included in the conscious move- 
ment of our civilization the most important of the 
non-participants of the older order. It is one of the 
far-reaching achievements of a democratic age. 

I have said that the old South was the true basis 
of the new nationalism. It has also been the real 
basis of the new democracy. It is true that it has 
maintained at the South the old consciousness of 
importance — a consciousness which still impresses 
itself upon the life of the Nation, and which has been 
wholly unmoved by the fact that the South contains 
to-day but one-fourth of the white population of the 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 17 

land. It has maintained the old self-confidence, both 
in counsel and in action. It has maintained, in large 
degree, the old reverences and the old assumptions 
of social usage. But, chiefly, it has maintained, as 
one of the deepest forces of its social heredity, the 
old sense of responsibility toward the unprivileged. 
It is this force which has given distinction and beauty 
to the alliance between the aristocracy and the com- 
mon people. 

It is in its surrender to this force that the old aris- 
tocracy has passed away. It is in response to this 
force that the plain people have arrived, have arrived 
through the manifestation of those latent powers of 
initiative, those native capacities of energy and pur- 
pose, which have proved the amazement of the his- 
torian. Where the aristocracy has been sometimes 
faithless to its broader mission, the plain people have 
often wrested the rights which have been denied. In 
more than one locality the common people have 
ruthlessly assumed the reins of power ; it is a phe- 
nomenon attended by its perils as well as by its in- 
spirations. But upon the whole it is chiefly by 
cooperation that the white sohdarity of the South 
has been secured, a solidarity which has been the 
broader ground of the new democracy, and which 
has sought a larger social unity upon the basis of 
unity of race. As a basis for democracy, the con- 
scious unity of race is not wholly adequate, but it is 
better as a basis of democratic reorganization than 
the distinctions of wealth, of trade, of property, of 
family, or class. The passion for rehabiUtation has 
swept the circle of social life, and has included every 
child within its policies. Through large sections of 
c 



i8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the South it has made the enthusiasm for popular 
education a form of civic piety. The cause of the 
common schools has become, not only a tenet of 
patriotism, but a social faith. It has entered the 
programme of politics. Popular education is to-day 
the theme of debate before multitudes gathered in 
humble " meeting-houses," or on the quiet hillsides 
under the open sky, or in the forest pulpits of the rural 
church. The debate proceeds, often attended by 
larger audiences and a deeper interest than any that 
attend the partisan discussions of the political cam- 
paign, a debate characterized by no clatter of the 
demagogue, but by that note of seriousness found in 
a man's voice only when he talks of the intimate 
realities of his domestic or religious experience. This 
is no vision of far-distant possibilities. It is a story 
of the present. Does it mean merely that democracy 
is being attempted ? It means rather that democracy 
— so far — has been achieved. Democracy in its 
essence has arrived when the rich man and the poor 
man, the man of the professions and the man of 
trade, the privileged and the unprivileged, unite to 
build the common school for the children of the 
State. It means that the non-participants have 
come to take their part, in a certain high and liberal 
sense, not only as the factors of government, but as 
the heirs of a larger world. 

And what of that other class of the " non-partici- 
pants " in the older civilization .'' What of the negro .-' 
It was inevitable that thus far he should have been 
largely omitted. It was inevitable that the movement 
of democracy should have first included the non-par- 
ticipants of the homogeneous population. But is the 



1 THE OLD IN THE NEW 19 

negro to be omitted in perpetuity ? Is the organiza- 
tion of democracy in our Southern States never to 
include him ? Is he never — as a factor of govern- 
ment and as the heir of a free and generous life — to 
be accepted as a participant in our civilization ? 

Such questions necessitate the definition of certain 
terms. Democracy does not mean the erasure of 
individuality in the man, the family, or the race. Its 
unity is truer and richer because not run in one color 
or expressed in monotony of form. Like all vital 
unities, it is composite. It is consistent with the indi- 
viduality of the man, it is consistent with the full indi- 
viduality and the separate integrity of the races. No 
one has ever asserted that the racial individuality of 
the Jew, preserved for sixty centuries and through 
more than sixty civilizations, by conviction from within 
and by pressure from without, was a contradiction of 
democratic life. Democracy does not involve the 
fusion of races any more than it involves the fusion 
of creeds or the fusion of arts. It does not imply 
that the finality of civilization is in the man who is 
white or in the man who is black, but in the man — 
white or black — who is a man. Manhood, in a 
democracy, is the essential basis of participation. 

We hear upon every hand that the South has 
refused its recognition to this principle. As a matter 
of fact, and under their amended constitutions, tens 
of thousands of black men are to-day registered voters 
in the Southern States, voters registered not against 
the consent of the South, but by the South's free and 
deliberate will.^ In view of the brief period of time 
since the negro's emancipation and in the light of the 
1 See also footnote to p. 198 of this volume. 



20 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

negro's political history, this voluntary registration of 
black men in the South, this partial but increasing ac- 
ceptance by the South of the qualified negro as a par- 
ticipant in the functions of government, is of far greater 
significance in the essential history of democracy than 
any temporary record of exclusion or injustice. The 
negro common school — nearly one million six hundred 
thousand negro children are enrolled in public schools 
supported by the Southern States ^ — this negro com- 
mon school, with its industrial and political signifi- 
cance, is of greater import in the history of our 
institutions than any temporary or partial denial of 
political privilege. With the suffrage question, in 
detail, I shall deal hereafter. I pause here only to 
protest against that crudity of impatience with which 
the world has so largely observed the development of 
Southern life. Expecting within the brief period of 
a generation the entire re-creation of our industrial 
fortunes and of our political institutions, men have 
waited to see the whole character of a civilization 
doffed like an outer garment ; the fabric of a new 
order — involving the deepest issues of memory, of 
passion, of pride, of racial and social habit — instantly 
re-created upon a strange loom and woven forthwith 
after a pattern commended by that strenuous dilet- 
tanteism which deals daily, with impartial ease, moral- 
ity to presidents, reminders to empires, and a reserved 
approval to the solar system. Are not the real achieve- 
ments of democracy at the South of far more signifi- 
cance than its failures ? 

Yet the gains of the past are not to be the occa- 

1 See Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Education for 1902, Vol. 
n, p. 2063. 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 21 

sions of surrender, but the ground of constructive 
effort. They are ours, not to excuse, but to inspire us. 
Out of those gains and out of the history which they 
have brought us, I think the cardinal considerations 
have come forth. The first is that, whatever Mr. 
Huxley may have read into the policy of emancipa- 
tion, that policy meant to North and South, to the 
Nation as a whole, only a deeper acceptance of obliga- 
tion. The second consideration is that this sense of 
responsibility, deepened rather than destroyed by the 
burden of slavery, was the noble and fruitful gift of 
the old South to the new, a gift brought out of the 
conditions of an aristocracy, but responsive and opera- 
tive under every challenge in the changing conditions 
of the later order. It was personified in Lee. It 
spoke in Curry, in Wade Hampton, in L. Q. C. Lamar, 
in William L. Wilson. It has continued to speak 
through men like John B. Gordon and Henry Grady 
in Georgia, like Thomas G. Jones and Hilary A. 
Herbert of Alabama, like Fenner and Blanchard of 
Louisiana, like Montague in Virginia, Uke Aycock and 
Heyward in the Carolinas. It Hes also at the heart 
of the future South, the South of younger men and 
more varied forces, and it is to this sense of responsi- 
bility, to this local and resident consciousness of power 
and right that — for every real and permanent enlarge- 
ment of democracy — the appeal must be addressed. 

That the South will do justice to the negro and to 
the more helpless elements of her industrial life, I 
have no manner of doubt. Certain current proposals 
of political policy at the South, certain passing phases 
of industrial oppression, receive direct and frequent 
criticism in the pages which are to follow. But this 



22 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

criticism is the criticism of a vigorous confidence, 
not the criticism of distrust. It is a criticism which 
assumes, before all things, the presence in Southern 
Hfe of that quick sense of social obligation — always 
the deepest virtue of the nobler aristocracy — which 
has come over to us from the past. It is a criticism 
which represents the conviction that now, as ever, 
the appeal to the local conscience, to the resident 
forces of Southern character, — this and only this 
is the real hope of the future of democracy in our 
Southern States. 

But — the reader asks — shall the Nation have 
nothing to say ? Is not the South too sensitive to 
criticism from without ? True, this sensitiveness is 
here. Is it a thing to be regretted ? Is it not better 
than indifference .-' Is it not a more wholesome social 
asset than the leaden torpor of certain other localities 
of the Nation ? Is it not a force of constructive good 
as compared with the temper of that self-satisfaction 
which is so conscious of its own attainment that it is 
wholly and placidly unconscious of the world's vaster 
hope, the century's ideal, the broader expectations of 
society .-* Is not this sensitiveness of the South a 
patent evidence of that very sense of responsibility to 
which reference has been made .-' Those only are 
sensitive to criticism who are conscious of failures 
because they are peculiarly conscious of great, com- 
manding, haunting responsibilities. 

But is not this larger and more sympathetic 
recognition of the sense of local obligation but 
another phase of the old cry to " Let the South 
alone " ? In one sense, No ; for in one sense that 
cry has been clearly wrong. There is such a thing 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 23 

as a national citizenship, and the rights of all its 
elements, however humble, must be the subjects of 
national discussion. But what is a national discus- 
sion ? Is it a criticism assuming that the Nation in 
its righteousness is on one side and that the South is 
sitting in darkness on the other ? If the Nation must 
include the South in the partnership of responsibility, 
the Nation recognizes and includes the South in the 
partnership of rectification. There is no federal 
law which is not dependent for its efhciency upon 
the action of Southern juries and upon the effective 
sentiment of Southern communities. If this is one 
country in the sense that there is no conceivable way 
for men in the South to commit wrongs outside of the 
Nation, it is also one country in the sense that there 
is no conceivable way for the Nation permanently to 
correct these wrongs except through the moral forces 
of the South. 

It is forgetfulness of this fact, it is the petulant 
depreciation of the South as a whole, which has called 
forth the cry, " Let us alone." And, as thus inter- 
preted, this cry reflects no desire to ignore the 
national interest and the national responsibilities 
created by the rights of a national citizenship. Thus 
understood, it is not so much a declaration of section- 
alism as a protest against it. 

Too often we find that when our Northern jour- 
nalism discusses wrongs at the North or at the West, 
it criticises the wrongs, but when it discusses wrongs 
at the South it criticises the SoiitJi. Such a criticism 
tends to make evils arising in the Southern States 
issues not between Americans everywhere and the 
foes everywhere of a true Americanism, but crude 



24 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

and bitter issues between the North and the South. 
It is a temper reflecting a Pharisaism which is the 
very soul of sectionalism — a Northern sectionalism 
as offensive as any sectionalism in our Southern 
States. The North, as the North, has nothing to do 
with wrongs at the South. The North, as the North, 
is, in the affairs of the South, a meddler pure and 
simple. The Nation, including the South as well as 
the North, and the West as well as the South and the 
North, has to do with every issue in the South that 
touches any national right of the humblest of its 
citizens. Too long it has been assumed, both at the 
North and at the South, that the North is the Nation. 
The North is not the Nation. The Nation is the life, 
the thought, the conscience, the authority, of all the 
land. The South desires from every quarter — as 
every section should desire — a true national partici- 
pation in her interests. She wishes from every 
spokesman of the Nation, whether in journalism or 
elsewhere, a criticism national in the exacting nobility 
of its ideals, national in its moral vigor, but national 
also in its intelligent and constructive sympathy. 

The development at the South of a larger sense 
of nationality will be coincident with the development 
of democracy. It is a consummation which a truly 
national journalism and the forces of a truly national 
criticism will advance. Such discussion is inevitable. 
It is therefore the part of the South both to welcome it 
and to inform it. This criticism may well speak frankly 
and accurately of evils, of the misdirections of growth, 
of failures both in purpose and in accomplishment. 
But its effect will be corrective in proportion as its 
temper is fraternal and its animus is cooperative. 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 25 

Its dominant note may well be the note of a dis- 
criminating but sincere appreciation. The record 
of the Civil War, upon its Southern side, closes with 
a chapter of defeat ; but it is a record of triumphs 
also, the triumphs of military genius, of industrial 
resourcefulness, of heroic if not unparalleled sacri- 
fices. Yet the historian will record that the victories 
which have followed Appomattox are perhaps greater 
than the victories which preceded it. Indeed, one 
is reminded of that suggestive and moving passage 
in which J. R. Green has presented the dramatic 
moment in the passing of Puritan England : — 

"A declaration from Breda, in which Charles 
promised a general pardon, religious toleration, and 
satisfaction to the army was received with a burst 
of national enthusiasm ; and the old Constitution was 
restored by a solemn vote of the Convention, that 
* according to the ancient and fundamental laws of 
this Kingdom the government is, and ought to be, by 
King, Lords, and Commons.' The King was at once 
invited to hasten to his realm; and on the 25th of 
May, Charles landed at Dover and made his way 
amidst the shouts of a great multitude to Whitehall. 

" In his progress to the capital Charles passed in 
review the soldiers assembled on Blackheath. . . . 
Surrounded as they were by a nation in arms, the 
gloomy silence of their ranks awed even the careless 
King with a sense of danger. But none of the vic- 
tories of the New Model were so glorious as the 
victory which it won over itself. Quietly and with- 
out a struggle, as men who bowed to the inscrutable 
will of God, the farmers and traders who had dashed 
Rupert's chivalry to pieces on Naseby field, who 



26 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

had scattered at Worcester the ' army of the aliens,' 
and driven into helpless flight the sovereign that now 
came 'to enjoy his own again,' who had renewed 
beyond sea the glories of Cressy and Agincourt, had 
mastered the parliament, had brought a King to 
justice and the block, had given laws to England, 
and held even Cromwell in awe, became farmers and 
traders again, and were known among their fellow- 
men by no other sign than their greater soberness 
and industry." ^ 

Such was the victory of Puritanism over itself. It 
was indeed a triumph of self-conquest. And yet 
there is, perhaps, a victory even more striking, in the 
story of the men who turned their faces homeward 
from Appomattox. These went back, not as trades- 
men to their trading, but as men unused to the 
harder offices of industry, to take up, with unfamiliar 
labor, a grim and desperate struggle for life and 
bread. These went back to no waiting opportunities, 
to no world of appointed tasks, but to a saddened 
and desolated land in which tasks must be found 
and opportunities created. Before them was no 
prospective enjoyment of a successful compact with 
former foes, but the torturing vision of long years 
in which, through the consequences of their defeat, 
their homes and their meagre fortunes were to be 
the scene of administrative "occupation." They 
were to work out their task, not as members of a 
homogeneous population, heirs of a single civic fate, 
but confronted by the vast multitude of their former 
bondmen, — dark, vague, uncertain masses , — half- 

1 " History of the English People," J. R. Green, Vol. HI, Chap. 
XII, p. 321 ; Harper & Brothers. 



I THE OLD IN THE NEW 27 

pitiful, half-terrifying, free forever from the white 
man's mastery, yet never free from the brooding and 
unyielding heritage of the black man's barbaric past. 
Under such conditions it was no easy thing to win 
the temper of confidence, to achieve the victories of 
patience, to find and actualize an industrial efficiency, 
a civic hopefulness, which might yield again an or- 
dered and happy world. 

The South, still possessing much of the fine genius 
of the old aristocracy, stood thus upon the threshold 
of a democratic age. We can hardly say that her 
entrance was unimpeded. She has brought little 
with her except her native resources, her historic and 
habitual faith in American institutions, her memories, 
her instinctive love of order and culture and beauty, 
her sense of civic responsibility. But she has crossed 
the threshold; and she has closed the door behind 
her. 



THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 



CHAPTER II 

THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE* 

Any description of the conditions of public educa- 
tion at the South must involve certain confessions of 
inadequacy and certain hearty celebrations of sub- 
stantial progress. 

It is not unnatural that there should still be left 
among us a large margin of the undone. That mar- 
gin still remains — partly through the personalness 
with which the South has always conceived the train- 
ing of the child, partly because of the class distinc- 
tions of the past, partly because of the poverty which 
followed war, partly because of the methods of spo- 
liation which followed peace. The programmes of 
public expenditure which were made difficult by pov- 
erty were made odious by spoliation. Thus the do- 
mestic temper of Southern life, wrought upon by the 
moral distrust of appropriations for public purposes, 
and strengthened by the self-absorption of private 
industry, resulted in an exaggerated individualism 
which became half a dogma of politics and half a 
philosophy of self-reliance. It is therefore inevitable 
that democracy should have become, with many, a 

1 An address delivered, in part, before the General Session of the 
National Educational Association, Boston, Massachusetts, July lo, 
1903. 

31 



32 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, 

mere creed of public economies ; and that self-reliance 
should have become, with some, but a doctrine of 
neglect. 

It may be said in general terms that the present 
public school system of the South dates from 1870.^ 

In the period, however, which immediately followed 
the Civil War, the dissatisfaction of Southern life with 
the political organization of the State drew the life 
of the South with increasing earnestness into the de- 
nominational organizations of the Church. These, at 
least, were loyally and securely Southern. It is natu- 
ral, therefore, that the actual educational organization 
of the Southern States should have first been denomi- 
national rather than civil, — an organization which 
left primary education to the home, which threw its 
influences into academic and sometimes narrow forms, 
but which has developed some of the noblest as well 
as some of the most characteristic forces of Southern 
life. 

But the institutions of the Church represented 
largely, though not exclusively, the education of the 
aristocracy. Following the period of reconstruction 
there arose a demand, increasingly self-conscious and 
increasingly imperative, from the great masses of an 
awakening democracy. As the sense of democracy 
is aroused education must be democratized. As the 
multitudes of our Southern citizenship came into the 
consciousness of power they turned instinctively to 

1 A State system of free public education was in partial existence in 
certain of the Southern States before i860. In Alabama, the Act of 
February 15, 1854, may be regarded as the beginning of the State sys- 
tem ; but here, as elsewhere throughout the South, the issue of the Civil 
War involved a reorganization of the system with the inclusion of the 
children of the colored population. 



II THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 33 

put their citizenship to school. It is the way men 
do. The beginnings of a real democracy, a democracy 
no longer bewildered by the older aristocracy which 
had been based upon slavery, no longer embarrassed 
by the later bureaucracy which had been based upon 
plunder, drew all men more closely together under 
the forms of the State, made men seek in the unity 
of their civic heritage and in response to the needs 
of a common citizenship what we call to-day the com- 
mon school. The public school came in response to 
a more largely distributed consciousness of public 
life, a larger life of public interests and of public 
responsibilities. As the masses of men came to share 
the powers of the State, as men came to be the State, 
they wanted to do the thing well. We find in all 
lands and with all peoples that as democracy becomes 
a reality the school becomes a necessity. 

And yet, while our public school system at the 
South has been necessary as an attempt, — an attempt 
which has had the consecrated intelligence and the 
heroic industry of our noblest souls, — we cannot say 
that it has thus far been wholly possible as an achieve- 
ment. Its aspiration, however, is one of the great 
unifying and constructive forces in the life of the 
South to-day, an aspiration which, already expressed 
in the deliberate and official policy of every Southern 
State, would include within the opportunities of a 
free school at the public charge all the children of its 
citizenship, rich and poor, white and black. And that 
aspiration in its generosity and its justice, is itself, I 
submit to you, an achievement of ennobling and splen- 
did augury. 

For this policy of pubhc education at the South 



34 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

has called us to no holiday emprise. The way is 
thronged with difficulties. The task has first involved 
a problem of population. Ours is a double popula- 
tion, a population divided by the felt and instinctive 
diversities of race. The land is occupied by two 
families of men between whom the difference in color 
is, perhaps, the least of the distinctions which divide 
them. The differences in racial character are accen- 
tuated by the differences of social heritage — one is 
the population of the free-born, one has been the 
population of the slave-born. 

The doctrine of race integrity, the rejection of the 
pohcy of racial fusion, is, perhaps, the fundamental 
dogma of Southern life. It is true that the animahsm 
of both races has at times attacked it. The formative 
dogmas of a civilization are reflected, however, not in 
the vices of the few, but in the instincts, the laws, the 
institutions, the habits, of the many. This dogma of 
the social segregation of the races, challenged some- 
times by fault of the black man, challenged sometimes 
by fault of the white man, is accepted and approved 
and sustained by the great masses of our people, white 
and black, as the elementary working hypothesis of 
civilization in our Southern States. 

The great masses of our colored people have them- 
selves desired it. It has made our public school sys- 
tem, however, a double system ; and it is inevitable 
that it should have often made the negro schools 
inferior to the white schools. But the social and 
educational separation of these races has created the 
opportunity and the vocation of the negro teacher, 
the negro physician, the negro lawyer, the negro 
leader of whatever sort. It has not only preserved 



n THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 35 

the colored leader to the negro masses by preventing 
the absorption of the best negro life into the life 
of the stronger race ; it has actually created, within 
thirty years, a representation of negro leadership in 
commerce, in the professions, in Church, and School, 
and State, which is worthy of signal honor and of 
sincere and generous applause. The segregation of the 
race has thrown its members upon their own powers 
and has developed the qualities of resourcefulness. 
The discriminations which they have borne in a meas- 
ure by reason of their slavery, and which have es- 
tablished the apartness of their group-life, are the 
discriminations which are curing the curse of slavery 
— an undeveloped initiative — and are creating the 
noblest of the gifts of freedom, the power of personal 
and social self-dependence. The very process which 
may have seemed to some like a policy of oppression 
has in fact resulted in a process of development. 

Our problem of population has thus involved a 
double system of public education. If the duality of 
the system has been of advantage to the weaker race, 
it has been more than an advantage to the children 
of the stronger. It has been indispensable and im- 
perative. In social as in personal achievement the 
necessities must precede the charities. The primary 
necessity of life in its every stratum of development 
is the preservation of its own genius and its own 
gains. The matured manhood of a more developed 
race may have something to give, should have some- 
thing to give, through helpful contact, to the life of 
the undeveloped. But the more highly developed 
race must not make this contact through its children. 
In the interest of our own further development and 



36 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

of our own larger achievement, in the interest of all 
that our achievement and development may mean in 
a nobler, juster, and more generous guidance of a 
lowlier people, the point of helpful contact must not 
be placed among the masses of the young, and the 
leverage of interracial cooperation must not seek its 
fulcrum upon the tender receptivities and the un- 
guarded immaturities of childhood. 

It is not merely that the marked differences of 
race suggest marked differences of method. We, 
at the South, are dealing with the negro, not as an 
individual, but as a multitude. In hundreds of our 
Southern counties the negro population is greater 
than the white. In my own home county, the 
county of the capital of the State of Alabama, our 
colored people outnumber our white people almost 
three to one. In an adjoining county the propor- 
tion of the colored population to the white popula- 
tion is six to one. Under such conditions the 
abandonment of the dual system of public education 
and the enforcement of a scheme of coeducation 
for the races would involve, not the occasional send- 
ing of a few negro children to a white school — as 
is your custom here — but the sending of a few 
white children to the negro school. It would not 
mean — as some would mistakenly advise — the train- 
ing of the children of the weaker race in the at- 
mosphere and under the associations of the stronger, 
but the attempted training of the children of the 
stronger race in the atmosphere and under the asso- 
ciations of the weaker. Such a policy would not 
give either promise or advantage to the stronger 
race, to the weaker race, or to any far-reaching and 



11 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 37 

constructive interest of civilization, A double system 
of public education is, with all its burdens and with 
its varied difficulties, an inevitable and unchangeable 
issue of our problem of population at the South. ^ 

But our problem of population — turning now with 
more especial consideration to the white population 
of the South — includes a formidable problem of dis- 
tribution. It is not only predominantly rural; it is 
relatively more meagre in its numbers than many 
have yet attempted to reahze. There are almost as 
many cities of twenty-five thousand people in the one 
small State of Massachusetts as in all the States of 
the secession put together. Taking our figures — • 
as throughout this address — from the twelfth and 
latest census of the United States, we find, in the 
single State of Massachusetts, twenty cities having a 
white population of more than twenty-five thousand 
— nearly twice as many as the total number of such 
cities in all the States of the late Confederacy. There 
are, including the State of Texas, in all the States of 
the secession but tivclvc cities having a white popu- 
lation of over twenty-five thousand. 

The one State of Massachusetts alone has forty- 
seven cities with a white population of over ten 
thousand. All the States of the Confederacy to- 
gether have but thirty-eight such cities. 

Moreover, the total aggregate white population of 

1 Even where the negro children are in a minority, as a negro 
writer has pointed out in the Cotigregationalist, Boston, May 30, 
1903, — it is an injury to the children of the weaker race to be edu- 
cated in an environment which is constantly subjecting them to adverse 
feeling and opinion. The result must be the development of a morbid 
race consciousness without any compensating increase in racial self- 
respect. 



38 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

all the cities in Alabama, South Carolina, North 
Carolina, and Tennessee, having a population of 
ten thousand inhabitants and over, does not equal 
in number the population of the city of Buffalo or 
the city of Pittsburg. 

The total aggregate white population of the States 
of Alabama and South Carolina does not equal the 
white population of the city of Chicago ; and the 
white population of the present city of New York 
exceeds the aggregate white population of the 
States of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, 
and South Carolina. 

I have dwelt thus upon the relative meagreness 
of the numbers of the white population of the South 
because it is inevitable that that population will have 
to bear for many years the larger share of the re- 
sponsibilities of education and of government. The 
burdens and the peculiar difficulties of the South are 
thus greater, I believe, than the world at large has 
yet appreciated. Of direct taxation the negro con- 
tributes little. Of indirect taxation he contributes 
an honorable and increasing share. The rents pay 
the taxes and the negro tenant helps to pay the rents. 
In a press telegram of the current week I am there- 
fore glad to find the following characteristic illustra- 
tion of the temper of the South in reference to the 
common schools of our colored people. The message 
appears in the columns of one of the daily journals 
of New York City under date of July 7 : — 

" Atlanta, Georgia, July 6. — Advocates of schemes 
to block negro education by State aid are in a 
bad minority in the House of Representatives of 
the General Assembly of Georgia. To-day after a 



11 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 39 

sharp debate the House, by an overwhelming vote, 
rejected a resolution providing that in the distribu- 
tion of money to common schools the county authori- 
ties should apportion the money among white and 
colored schools according to the taxable property of 
the two races. This would have meant the death of 
negro education in Georgia, as the blacks pay only 
one-fifteenth of the taxes, although receiving about 
one-third of the State appropriation for public schools. 
To-day's debate showed that the sentiment of the 
Georgia legislators is that the State should contribute 
to the limit of its ability to the common school edu- 
cation of its colored people." 

Georgia's action is not unique. The vote of her 
legislature reflects the settled and established policy 
of every Southern State.^ 

Returning to the fact that the white population of 
New York City exceeds the aggregate white popula- 
tion of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and 
South Carolina, you will observe that our problem of 
population has thus brought clearly into view some 
of the difficulties of isolation. Ours is not only a 
rural population ; in many sections it is a population 
so small in numbers as to be but thinly distributed 
over large areas, with poor roads, with inadequate 
recourse, therefore, to strong centres of organization, 
and without that consequent social efficiency which 
easily secures the creation and the administration of 
the efficient school. 

In the United States at large 20 per cent of the 

^ See an effective criticism of the above proposal by Charles B. 
Aycock, Governor of North Carolina, in his biennial message to the 
General Assembly, 1903, Raleigh, N.C.; Edwards and Broughton. 



40 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

school population live in cities of twenty-five thou- 
sand population or over; at the South our cities of 
twenty-five thousand contain but 6 per cent of the 
children of our public schools. Our city schools, 
however, are usually adequate and efiicient. 

The East has suffered, perhaps, from an over- 
municipalization of life, from the tendency of popu- 
lation cityward. The South has suffered from the 
under-municipalization of life, from that too general 
dependence upon agriculture which has kept almost 
85 per cent of our population in the country, and has 
given us cities few and small. The building of good 
roads, the development of manufactures, the method 
of school consolidation, the increasing tendency to 
apply the educational qualifications of the suffrage to 
white men as well as black, the policy of our legisla- 
tures reenforced by the educational patriotism of all 
our people, will at length give us Southern schools 
adapted to Southern needs. 

Those needs will slowly but surely have more ade- 
quate response. Our people are resolved to have 
their schools, despite the difficulties presented by our 
problems of population, — a population which is, as 
we have seen, biracial in character, comparatively 
small in number, comparatively rural in its distribu- 
tion, — and despite the fact that our task of public 
education involves not only these grave problems of 
population but as grave a problem of resources. 

The figures of our national census show that from 
i860 to 1870 there was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the 
assessed value of Southern property and that the 
period of reconstruction added, in the years from 
1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss. 



II THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 41 

In i860 the assessed value of property in Massa- 
chusetts was $777,000,000, as contrasted with 
$5,200,000,000^ for the whole South; but at the 
close of the war period Massachusetts had, in 1870, 
$1,590,000,000 in taxable property, as contrasted with 
but $3,000,000,000 for the whole South. The stand- 
ards of assessment are probably much more exacting 
at the East than at the South, yet this consideration 
does not operate wholly to erase the contrast which 
remains. Such had been the shrinkage in values 
at the South, such had been the relative increase 
in values in New England, that the one small State 
of Massachusetts had more than one-half as much of 
taxable property as the combined wealth of all our 
Southern States. 

The very theory of emancipation was that the fate 
of the black man was the responsibility of the Nation, 
yet the issue of war left the negro in his helplessness 
at the threshold of the South ; and the South, with 
the gravest problems of our civilization challenging her 
existence and her peace, was expected to assume the 
task of the education of two populations out of 
the poverty of one. I confess that I think the con- 
science of the South has something to say to the 
conscience and the opulence of the Nation, when, 
with millions for battleships, tens of millions for 
armaments, millions for public buildings, and tens of 
millions for rivers and harbors, the Nation allows the 
academic fabric of paper theories to stand between 
the vast resources of its wealth and the human 

^ The fact that slaves were included in such estimates does not 
lessen the economic catastrophe represented in the loss of a form of 
property in which so much of energy and wealth had become involved. 



42 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

appeal, North or South or East or West, of the chil- 
dren of its citizenship. 

A democracy which imposes an equal distribution 
of political obligation must find some way to afford a 
more equal distribution of educational opportunity. 
To a national philanthropy or to our national legisla- 
tion there should be an appealing significance in the 
fact that the annual expenditure for public education 
in the United States at large is — per capita of the 
pupils in average attendance — $21.38, that in the 
great States of the West the average expenditure is 
^3i-59> while for such States as Alabama and the 
Carolinas this expenditure is approximately but 
$4.50. Let us not, in contrasting these figures, for- 
get the educational heroism of the South. Unques- 
tionably the South must call more freely and more 
generously into play the policy of local taxation by 
the school district or by the county, but of the State 
revenues for general purposes 50 per cent, in Ala- 
bama and the Carolinas, are appropriated to the 
support of public education.^ 

It is inevitable, however, that our problems of popu- 
lation, our problem of an isolated rural Hfe, and our 
problem of resources should have resulted in the illit- 
eracy of the present. If I dwell for a few minutes 
upon the figures as to the illiterate, I do so with the 
reminder that there are worse things in a democracy 
than illiteracy, and with the passing assurance that I 

1 It is interesting to note that in 1890 there was "expended for 
pubhc schools on each $100 of true valuation of all real and persona) 
property " 22.3 cents in Arkansas and 24.4 cents in Mississippi, as com- 
pared with 20.5 cents in New York and 20.9 cents in Pennsylvania- 
See Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education, 1902, Vol. I. p. xc*- 



n THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 43 

shall soon be able to turn to the brighter side. But 
remedies and congratulations will not avail us save as 
we frankly and resolutely face the facts. 

There are in our Southern States more than 
3,500,000 souls ten years of age and over, who can- 
not read and write ; nearly 50 per cent of the colored 
population, and 12.7 per cent of the white. ^ Of the 
native white population of our whole country, ten 
years of age and over, the South has 24 per cent; 
but of the native white illiteracy of our country, the 
South has 64 per cent. 

There are in the United States 231 counties in 
which 20 per cent and over of the white men of 
voting age cannot read and write. Of these 231 
counties, 210 are in our Southern States.^ 

Taking a few of our States individually, we find 
that — among the white population ten years of age 
and over — there are 54,000 iUiterates in South Caro- 
lina. That is, for South Carolina or for any other 
Southern State, a very large number of white people. 
It is only 13.5 per cent of the total white population 

^ The illiteracy of the native white population of the Southern 
States ranges from 8.6 per cent in Florida, 8 per cent in Mississippi, 
and 6.1 per cent in Texas, to 17.3 per cent in Louisiana, and 19.5 per 
cent in North Carolina; as contrasted with 0.8 per cent in Nebraska, 
1.3 per cent in Kansas, 2.1 per cent in Illinois, 1.2 per cent in New 
York, and 0.8 per cent in Massachusetts. A far juster comparison, 
however, is that which indicates the contrast, not between the South 
and the rest of the country in 1900, but between the South of 1880 and 
the South of to-day. This progress is indicated in Table V of the 
Appendix, p. 300. 

- See Appendix A, Table VIII. It will be noted that a number of 
the counties classified as in the South, and a number outside the 
South, include in the "white" population — on the border of Mexico 
and on the Canadian frontier — an appreciable foreign element. 



44 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

over the age of nine. Yet this is a company of white 
people greater in number than the aggregate white 
population of the five largest cities of the State, — 
Charleston, Columbia, Spartanburg, Greenville, and 
Sumter. 

The white ilhterates of Georgia are but 11.9 per 
cent of the white population ten years of age and 
over, but their number exceeded in 1900 the number 
of the aggregate white population of Georgia's three 
largest cities, — Atlanta, Savannah, and Augusta. 

The white illiterates of Tennessee, 14. i per cent 
of the white population ten years of age and over, 
exceeded in 1900 the number of the total white popu- 
lation of her six largest cities, — Nashville, Memphis, 
Knoxville, Chattanooga, Clarksville, and Jackson. 

The white illiterates of Alabama, nearly 15 per 
cent of the white population of ten years of age and 
over, exceeded in 1900 the number of the aggregate 
white population of her fifteen largest cities ; and in 
1900 the number of the white illiterates of North 
Carolina, 19.4 per cent, was more than double the 
number of the combined white population of her six- 
teen largest cities.^ 

The possible surprise occasioned by these con- 
trasted totals should suggest to us that such figures 
teach much more than the relative magnitude of the 
number of the illiterate. The figures indicate, not 
only the number of the white illiterates in the State, 
but the relatively small proportion of the white popu- 
lation now found within the cities. Such comparisons 
indicate the presence of many colored people in our 

1 See Twelfth Census of the U.S. (1900), Vol. I, Table 23, and Re- 
port of the U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1902, Vol. H, p. 2316. 



11 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 45 

Southern cities, but they especially indicate a fact 
upon which I have already dwelt as of cardinal and 
conspicuous importance, the fact that the population 
of the South is still characteristically and preponder- 
antly rural. 

It is not as a prophet of calamity that I have dwelt 
upon some of the facts as to our illiteracy. The 
problem is formidable, but no problem need be the 
occasion of discouragement so long as that problem 
is apparently yielding to the forces of its reduction. 
Relatively and actually, illiteracy is not gaining upon 
the schools. The schools, in spite of all our diffi- 
culties, are gaining upon our illiteracy. Taking our 
population of prospective or possible voters, the male 
population, white and black, ten years of age and 
over, we find that there is not a State in the South 
which has not largely reduced its illiteracy within 
the twenty years from 1880 to 1900. 

Upon the other hand, as I take some kindly satis- 
faction in reminding you, there is but one State in 
New England — Rhode Island — which has not added 
both to the percentage and to the aggregate of its 
male illiteracy since 1880.1 Your percentages of gen- 
eral male illiteracy are very much lower than our 
own, but they are a Httle greater to-day than they 
were twenty years ago. If your figures must include 
the foreigner, ours must include the negro. New 
York had over forty-seven thousand more of male 
ilhterates in 1900 than in 1880; Pennsylvania had in 
1900 over sixty-two thousand more such ilhterates than 
in 1880; Massachusetts, over twenty -three thousand 
more than in 1880; and the percentages have grown 

1 See Twelfth Census of the U.S., Vol. II, Table LV, p. ci. 



46 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

with the aggregates. Totals have grown a little in 
some of the States of the South, but including even the 
colored population, the percentage of male illiterates 
has been reduced in Alabama from 49 to 32 per cent; 
in Tennessee from 36 to 20 per cent; in Georgia 
from 48 to 29 per cent; in North Carolina from 46 
to 27 per cent; in Arkansas from 35 to 19 per cent. 
In the Southern States our public schools, with all 
their embarrassments, are overtaking our illiteracy ; 
in some of the Eastern States the illiteracy of future 
voters has gained just a little upon the range and 
contact of the public schools. Illiteracy is, in fact, 
not a sectional, but a national, problem ; and I think 
that we must everywhere declare that a democracy 
which still comprises more than six millions of people 
who cannot even read and write has not yet ade- 
quately solved the problem of popular education. 

I find, however, no hopelessness in the illiteracy of 
the South, because, as I have suggested, we are now 
making decisive reductions in its volume. I find 
no hopelessness in it, because it is the illiteracy, not of 
the degenerate, but simply of the unstarted. Our 
unlettered white people are native American in stock, 
virile in faculty and capacity, free in spirit, unbroken, 
uncorrupted, fitted to learn, and worthy of the best 
that their country and their century may bring them. 

To speak hopefully of the taught is to speak even 
more hopefully, even more confidently, of the teacher. 
The relative poverty of the South has its compensa- 
tions. It places at the command of the public school 
system of the Southern States a teaching force of 
broad ambitions, of real culture, and of generous re- 
finement. The high social standard of our teaching 



11 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 47 

personnel is our assurance that the training of the 
children of the South is in the hands of worthy repre- 
sentatives of its thought and feeling. We know that 
in its public school system the South of to-day is 
touching through its best the life and the institutions 
of to-morrow. 

The crowning argument of our hopefulness lies, how- 
ever, in the educational enthusiasm of all our people. 
Alabama, within five years, has doubled her general 
appropriations for public education. The masses of 
a sincere people are taught the great realities of 
order, liberty, and culture, not merely by what they 
have, but by what they long to have. The things 
that a whole people, in the passions of their sacrifice, 
have resolved to do are of more significance and of 
more importance in the history of a democracy than 
anything that they may have failed to do. 

But the Nation must be considerate of the South 
and the South must be patient with herself. The 
burden of responsibility among us must long fall 
heavily upon the few. We have seen that there are 
in our Southern States 210 counties in which 20 
per cent, or over, of the white men of voting age can- 
not read and write. Place to one side the great un- 
lettered masses of our colored population, add to these 
the unlettered numbers of our white population, andyou 
will at once see that the number which remains has a 
part to play which is so serious in its responsibilities 
and so far-reaching in its moral and civic significance 
that the South may well receive the large-tempered 
understanding of all the lovers of mankind, and of 
all the wise befrienders of the State. 

A final and happy element of hopefulness lies in 



48 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the thought that if our system of pubUc education is 
largely uncompleted, we can build, in completing it, 
by the light of the gains and the errors of older com- 
monwealths. Tardiness should save from false starts 
and should protect us from traditional mistakes. I 
trust that we shall build in such a manner as more 
largely to practicalize and moralize the general sys- 
tem of public education. I trust that our conscious- 
ness of the problem of illiteracy will not lead us to 
the mistaken conclusion that the supreme task of any 
system of schools is the mere removal of illiteracy. 
The school must stand, rather, for a larger and larger 
measure of trained intelligence, of controlled and 
sobered will, of sound, resourceful, and efficient life. 

I trust that we shall realize, moreover, that the 
fullest duty of the modern school, of the public 
school in a democracy, is a duty not only to culture, 
but to citizenship. The State-supported school must 
give the State support, — support as it teaches with 
a healing wisdom and an impartial patriotism the his- 
tory of the past; support as it looks out into the 
track of an over-freighted destiny and clears and 
steadies the vision of the future ; but first of all, sup- 
port to the Nation in this day — in this day because 
this day is not supremely our fathers' or our chil- 
dren's, but uniquely and supremely ours. 

The schools of a people, the schools of a real peo- 
ple, must be, primarily, not the moral gymnasia of 
reminiscence or the transcendent platforms of future 
outlook. They must touch this day's earth and this 
day's men through the truths and the perils of to-day. 
They must be instructors of the contemporary civic 
conscience. And in this hour, I take it, they must 



II THE SCHOOLS OF THE PEOPLE 49 

help the State to bring to men a profounder and 
therefore a simpler reverence for the institutions and 
the processes of public order. For a long time we 
have heard that democracy is an institution of lib- 
erty ; but if democracy be not also an institution of 
public order, Hberty will not long be an institution 
of democracy. Where minorities — mob minorities, 
North or South or East or West — presume to admin- 
ister the laws of the majority, the elementary compact 
of democracy is dissolved. The mob which abandons 
the processes of social self-control weakens the per- 
sonal self-control which stays and conquers crime, 
and increases by its ferocities the very animalism it 
has attempted to destroy. Its instructions in horror 
touch the minds of tens of thousands, its barbarities 
burn to-day the guilty and set aflame the hates and 
humors which to-morrow burn the innocent. 

Such spectacles are national phenomena, challeng- 
ing everywhere the national forces of American good 
sense, and demanding of us whether the mere gravity 
of the crime or the mere weakness of the constabu- 
lary is enough to excuse any American community in 
abandoning the safeguards of justice and the solemn 
processes of trial for the processes of a social hysteria 
which divides its noisome interest between the details 
of the crime and the souvenirs of the execution. Are 
these the august and reverend trappings of Justice in 
a democracy .'' 

Our schools must teach our children what their 
country is. Our schools, North and South, must 
help men to see that liberty of government means 
that there is no liberty except through being gov- 
erned, that being governed and being governable are 



50 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, ii 

largely the measure of our distance from the jungle ; 
that a governed and governable people, when chal- 
lenged by the sickening atrocities of crime, by the 
torturing spectacles of lust and hate, first have a 
sober recourse to the thought, not of what is due to 
the criminal, but of what is due to their civilization, 
their country, and their children. 

For we may be well assured that, whether we teach 
through the school or not, the teaching is being done ; 
for society itself is the final educational institution of 
our human life. Not only through school and home 
and Church, but through the habits of our commerce, 
through books, through each day's press, through our 
posters on the streets, the music in our parks, our 
amusements and our recreations, — above all, through 
that great enfolding, effectual instrument of our social 
self-projection, the public opinion of our day, our 
children are being put to school. 

I pray that within these varied orbits the people's 
schools may do their schooling well, not as detached 
or isolated shops of truths and notions, but as deliberate 
and conscious factors of a sounder social equilibrium. 
I pray that they. North and South and East and 
West, may take their places as the organs of that 
force of social gravity, that moral dynamic which in 
the University of the World keeps the poise of fac- 
tions and classes, upholds the authority of institu- 
tions, the majesty and the happiness of government, 
the worth of laws, the high securities of freedom — 
that moral dynamic which wise men have called the 
fear of God, the force of affection and sobriety which 
holds life to reverence and reverence to reason, — as, 
through their uncrossing pathways, the stars flash, 
star-lighted, round their suns. 



A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 



CHAPTER III 

A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 



The movement of democracy at the South presents, 
essentially, a task of constructive statesmanship. If 
the representatives of political and party action are 
earnestly concerning themselves with the problems of 
popular education, it is because such problems are 
the reflection, not only of the desire of the people, but 
of the need of the State. It is understood that uni- 
versal education is, in the broadest sense, no mere 
topic of the educator. It is the interest of the 
citizen. 

Illiteracy is being recognized with admirable can- 
dor and increasing courage. Here and there a voice 
is heard which speaks with depreciation of its signifi- 
cance. There is an occasional note of denial and 
resentment. But with increasing knowledge denial 
is abandoned, and with increasing reflection resent- 
ment passes into concern, and concern into a deepen- 
ing solicitude both for the unfortunate and for the 
South. Men recognize that the greater reproach is 
not illiteracy, but indifference to it. They perceive 
that its significance cannot be offset by dwelling upon 
the admitted and often darker evils of other sections. 
When the life of the State is burdened or imperilled 

S3 



54 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

by unfortunate conditions, the word of a true patriot- 
ism is that which recognizes these conditions in order 
to remove them. It is never that word of superficial 
partisanship which, lulHng to sleep the consciousness 
of need, gives permanence and increase to the need 
itself. If States do not grow wise by forgetting their 
knowledge, it is equally true that they do not add to 
their knowledge by forgetting their ignorance. 

The South has been moved, however, by the fate 
of the unfortunate as well as by the need of the 
State. Her interest in the unlettered masses of her 
white people is due to no motive of condescension or 
contempt. Most of them are a people of pure and 
vigorous stock — our "contemporary ancestors," as 
the president of Berea has described them. Many of 
them are distinguished by peculiar intelligence and 
force. Some of them are people of property. An 
occasional reactionary spirit declares that because he 
esteems and loves them, and because they are better 
than many of the literate population of other sections, 
the movement which reveals their ignorance and 
insists upon their education is to be resisted. The 
answer of the South, as a whole, is that — because she 
esteems and loves them — their children are entitled 
to the broadest opportunities and the best advantages 
which life may offer; that any movement which 
reveals their ignorance in order to bring them knowl- 
edge, which would increase their knowledge not upon 
the ground of their incapacity, but upon the ground 
of their value to society, which asserts their right to 
the world's best, and the world's right to their best, 
is a movement to be commended and reenforced. 

There was a time when illiteracy was a normal 



in A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 55 

factor in society. That time has passed. lUiteracy 
is abnormal ; literacy is the normal assumption of 
civilization. When practically all men — all of the 
general masses of mankind — were illiterate, literacy 
was hardly an element in the movement of popu- 
lar progress or in the play of industrial competi- 
tion. Such conditions have passed forever. Literacy 
in the greater fraction and illiteracy in the smaller 
fraction of population means that the smaller frac- 
tion is subjected to a relative disadvantage in 
every movement of experience, whether religious, 
social, political, or industrial. It is shut out, reli- 
giously, from the broader outlook upon that word 
of God which is daily uttered in the increasing 
freedom and fulness of human life ; it is shut out, 
socially, from that wholesome largeness of temper 
which results from the knowledge of a more varied 
world of men and things; it is shut out, politically, 
from the educative influence of those great national 
debates which form the instruction of the plain man 
in economic truth and democratic policies, thus help- 
ing to make of citizenship no mere local perquisite, 
but a national privilege. The fraction of the illiter- 
ate is shut off, industrially, from that confidence which 
results from being able to read what others read, to 
know what others know, and so to do, to the freest 
and best advantage, the business of life. The farmer 
or the laborer who can read and write finds in that 
power the enlargement of his market. He is not 
only more fitted to work or to produce, he can be 
informed in a broader sense as to the conditions of 
industry, and can sell to more intelligent advantage 
his product or his labor. It is evident that, here and 



56 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

there, the individual member of society may rise by 
sheer force of some peculiarity of character, or some 
chance of opportunity, out of many of the limitations 
which iUiteracy imposes. But it is true, upon the 
whole, that for the great masses of men in the civili- 
zation of our world to-day, illiteracy is the symbol of 
non-participation. 

II 

Thus, in relation to the fuller life of our civiliza- 
tion, there are in our Southern States two classes 
of non-participants, — the masses of our negroes and 
the illiterates of our white population. There is now 
little question at the South as to the nature of her 
policy toward the latter. Their freest education and 
equipment is almost everywhere recognized as the 
supreme interest of society and the State. The na- 
ture of the policy of the South toward the former, the 
task of the education of the negro, presents a prob- 
lem upon which there has been much of serious and 
explicit difference. Writing from within the South, 
and as a part of the South, I may wish the negro 
were not here, but my wishing so would not provide 
him either with adequate transportation or another 
destiny. He is here among us. We are face to face 
with him. We must take him as we find him, and 
talk about him as he is. The problem he presents is 
one which silence has not dissipated, nor indifference 
answered ; which bitterness may always intensify, 
but which bitterness has never solved. There are 
those who tell us that the negro is to go to Africa. 
How long will it take to persuade the negro he 
should go .'' Then how long will it take to persuade 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 57 

the white man to let him go ? Then how long will 
the going take ? If he fails, he will return ; if he 
succeeds, the white man will follow him upon his 
lands, as he has followed the Indian here and the 
Filipino across the seas, and, competing with him 
upon his new soil, will create the same difficulties 
which were here abandoned. The great problems 
of civilization, for individuals or for races, are not 
solved by deserting them. 

In the meanwhile nine millions of them are here. 
What are we to do with them .'' 

There are some who tell us that " as a matter of 
scientific fact" the negro death-rate is a little greater 
than the negro birth-rate, and that therefore the negro 
is to become extinct. But a busy world cannot count 
so much on " sociological data " as to pause to calcu- 
late the proper estimates of extinction for a race which 
does its dying by doubling its numbers within forty 
years. 

And in the long generations through which the race 
is dying, what are we to do ? 

If education as a power of real and constructive 
good is of value to a living race, to a race achieving 
and succeeding, it is of still greater value to a failing 
race. If society needs the corrective and upbuilding 
force of education to protect it against ignorance in 
the wholly capable, the ignorance of the partially 
incapable requires — for the protection and upbuild- 
ing of society — not less education, but more, an edu- 
cation practical in its forms but human and liberal in 
its spirit. 

And yet it were folly to ignore the fact that the 
policy of negro education has been often and seriously 



58 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

questioned. One may well write of it, however, not 
as an alien policy, but as a policy of the South, inas- 
much as negro education has been for thirty years — 
under local administrations elected by the people — 
the official and authoritative policy of every Southern 
State. If, therefore, I speak here at length of the 
schooling and the training of this backward race, I 
do so, not because it is a duty which the South has 
ignored, but because the South, with generous fore- 
sight and incalculable patience, has so largely attempted 
to discharge it. 

Three objections, however, have partially attended 
and embarrassed the maintenance of this policy of 
our Southern States. 

I. There has been opposition to the policy upon 
the ground that the education of the schools would 
lead to vanity in life ; that the supposed tendencies 
of the negro would increasingly draw his ambition 
in the direction of the higher education, and that the 
higher education of the negro would imperil the inter- 
ests of race integrity. 

II. There has been opposition to the negro com- 
mon school, — first, upon the ground that it has done 
too little, inasmuch as it has left the general life of 
the race so largely unaffected ; secondly, upon the 
ground that it has done too much, and has " spoiled 
good field hands by teaching books." 

III. There has been opposition, not only to lower 
education and to higher education, but also to indus- 
trial education, — to industrial education upon the 
ground that this form of negro training must result 
in industrial friction and competitive warfare between 
the races. 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 59 

It would be strange indeed if education — a policy 
of God long before it was a policy of man, a policy 
of the universe long before it was a policy of society 
— were to find its first defeat at the negro's hands.^ 
And yet in each of these objections there lies the force 
of a half-truth, a half-truth to be frankly recognized, 
and to be fully understood before it can be fully met. 
I believe, however, that the long-standing policy of 
the South has been fully justified, and that such mis- 
apprehensions as have existed have arisen partly from 
the misunderstanding of the facts and partly from 
certain evident errors in our traditional educational 
methods. 

I. In dealing with the famihar question as to the 
"increasing perils of the negro's higher education," 
let us see, first of all, if these perils are increasing ; 
then we may inquire as to how far they exist at all. 
Let us see how much higher education the negro is 
getting, not merely at the South, but from anybody 
anywhere. 

Let me say at once, however, that the South can- 
not well be opposed to the higher education of those 
who are fitted for it.^ Where individual capacity 
exists, the only thing, the only right and wise thing 

^ See Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North 
Carolina, 1902, p. viii. Superintendent Joyner's report should be care- 
fully read in forming any adequate estimate of the real temper of the 
South in reference to negro education. 

'^ See also an admirable paper on " Negro Education," by W. B. Hill, 
Chancellor of the University of Georgia, in the Proceedings of the 
Sixth Conference for Education in the South, 1903, p. 206, published 
by The Committee on Publication, Room 607, 54 William Street, New 
York City. 



6o THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

in the world, to do with it is to equip it and direct it. 
The repression of it will result, not in its extinction, 
but in its perversion. A thwarted and perverted 
capacity is a peril both to the individual and to the 
State. Repression is not a remedy for anything. 
The repression and perversion of the capacities of 
our greatest negro would have made him the most 
dangerous factor in Southern life. Such capacities 
may be seldom found. Where, however, these capaci- 
ties exist, there is neither joy nor safety nor right nor 
common sense in the belittling of a thing which God 
has given, or in the attempted destruction of a power 
which has entered into the experience of the world as 
one of the nobler assets of the Nation and of humanity. 

But higher education is, it seems, not a broaden- 
ing pathway of negro progress. The dread that our 
colored people, in increasing multitudes, would thus 
clutch at the vanities of culture in order to leave 
behind the homelier interests of useful labor has not 
been realized. Let us note the facts. Says Com- 
missioner Harris : — 

"In 1880, the population of the entire country had 
4362 persons in each 1,000,000 enrolled in schools of 
secondary and higher grade, but in that year, 1880, 
the colored people had only 1289 out of each 
1,000,000 enrolled in secondary and higher educa- 
tion. This means that the general average of the 
whole country showed three and one-half times as 
many pupils in schools of secondary and higher edu- 
cation as the general average for the colored people. 

"In 1890, the number of colored persons in high 
schools and colleges had increased slightly, namely, 
from 1289 to 2061 in each 1,000,000 of the colored 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 6i 

population, and in the year 1900 they had reached 
2517 in each 1,000,000. But in the meantime the 
general average for the United States had increased 
from 4362 to 10,743 per 1,000,000. While the num- 
ber in colored high schools and colleges had increased 
somewhat faster than the population, it had not kept 
pace with the general average of the whole country, 
for it had fallen from 30 per cent to 24 per cent of 
the average quota. 

"Of all the colored pupils only i in 100 was en- 
gaged in secondary and higher work, and that ratio 
has continued substantially for the past twenty years. 
If the ratio of colored population in secondary and 
higher education is to be equal to the average for the 
whole country, it must be increased to five times its 
present average."^ 

If the figures of the commissioner could take into 
account the number of negroes who are classed as 
pursuing the courses of " colleges " which are colleges 
only in name, the figures would show a still larger 
percentage of negro pupils in strictly primary work. 
The statistics indicate, as compared with the white 
race, no relative increase in the number who are 
taking a so-called higher education, and the record of 
all the facts would indicate that truth still more clearly 
than the figures quoted. 

It is true that higher education possesses its 
" perils." All education possesses its perils. They 
are apparent among any white population as well as 
among any negro population. There is always pres- 
ent the danger of superficiality, the danger of self- 

^ See Report of United States Commissioner of Education for 1899- 
1900, Vol. I, pp. Iviii and lix of the Preface. 



62 THE TRESENT SOUTH chap. 

glorification, the insistent temptation to substitute 
show for reality and cleverness for work. Education, 
on its most elementary side, involves risk. Many a 
life, among our white people, has been educated out 
of contentment without being educated into efficiency. 
Many a blind heart which was at peace in its blind- 
ness has gained only enough light to lose its peace 
without the gain of full and accurate sight. These 
are but the familiar risks of liberty. Many a man 
would have been prevented from being a murderer if 
he had been kept always in a prison. But society 
has realized that while the lifelong prison might have 
prevented murder, it would also have prevented man- 
hood, and that it is well to give men freedom, upon 
the broad and famihar ground that the smaller risk of 
murder is of slight concern as compared with the 
larger chance of gaining manhood. 

Education brings its dangers. But the risk of 
making fools is of smaller import than the larger 
chance of making men. Through long experience 
society has also found that the dangers of ignorance 
are greater than the dangers of knowledge. In the 
case of the negro it is evident that the educational 
process has a larger record of failure than in the 
case of the Caucasian. This was inevitable. The 
kind of education which has been tried by the negro 
in the mass has not been adapted to his racial need ; 
it has been the Caucasian's kind. But as the Cauca- 
sian's kind is the only kind which the Caucasian has 
been largely active in giving, the faults of misadapta- 
tion can hardly be charged against the negro. 

Undoubtedly our negroes in the mass need, chiefly, 
an education through industrial forms. Of this I 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 63' 

shall speak hereafter. It is, however, in the interest 
of the race as well as in the interest of the South 
that the exceptional negro should be given a broad 
and generous measure of exceptional advantage. 

That every race is a wiser, safer, and better social 
force for having a leadership — wise, well-informed, 
and true — is axiomatic. No race can succeed, as 
one of their number has wisely said, " by allowing 
another race to do all its thinking for it." The 
South has insisted, and has insisted wisely, on main- 
taining the absolute distinctness of racial life. The 
wisdom of this insistence, the deep sociological value 
of what has been called "race prejudice," — despite 
its sometimes brutal and excuseless manifestations in 
every section, — will have, I believe, an ever widening 
recognition. But if human society is to estabUsh its 
distinctions of racial life, it will find that it can base 
these distinctions upon intelligence more securely 
than upon ignorance. Ignorance will be blind to 
them, will hate them and attack them. InteUigence 
will perceive them, and, if they are reasonably and 
soundly fixed, will understand them and cooperate 
with them. The " troublesome " negro at the South 
is not the negro of real intelligence, of sound and 
generous training, but the negro possessing, or pos- 
sessed by, the distorted fancies of ^n untrained will 
and a crude w/^-education. 

The very segregation of the negro race seems thus 
to estabhsh the necessity for the real training of their 
abler minds, — for those differentiations of negro 
ability which will give to the race a sane and in- 
structed leadership from within. 

The development of this leadership, the opportuni- 



64 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ties of freer and larger growth, are more important to 
the race, to the South, and to the interests of racial 
separation than can easily be realized. Racial dis- 
tinctness is chiefly threatened at two levels, the lowest 
and the highest ; at the lowest, where vice obliterates 
the safeguards of domestic purity; at the highest, 
where the occasional refusal of the broadest develop- 
ment sometimes obliterates the safeguards of liberty. 
The true and permanent way to lead the negro race to 
keep wisely to itself is to make it sufficient within 
itself. The race which is to be forever forced to go 
outside of itself to touch the broadest and richest life 
of its generation will never be consciously and finally 
anchored in the doctrine of race integrity. The true 
basis of race individuality is not in race degradation 
nor in race repression, but in race sufficiency. 

II. In discussing the questions arising from the 
negro common school, it is perhaps too often assumed 
that the policy of general education has been really 
tested. If the results are unsatisfactory, is it not 
largely due to the inadequacy of the experiment ? 
Almost half of our colored people in the Southern 
States - — after forty years of freedom — are wholly 
illiterate. Large numbers of them are indeed the 
despair of statesmanship. But they are not worth- 
less because they have gone to the school. Rather, 
they are worthless because they left it, or they have 
left it because they were worthless. Shall the worth- 
lessness of these negroes condemn the school ? Shall 
we condemn the education of the negro, shall we 
condemn the education of any people, on the evi- 
dence presented by those who, through poverty or 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 65 

weakness or wilfulness, have touched the system of 
education only to desert it ? 

Nor in bringing an impeachment against negro 
education are we merely impeaching the negro ; we 
should also be impeaching the only remedial, cor- 
rective, and constructive policy of a democracy. If 
we are not going to educate them, what are we going 
to do with them ? 

At least, let us not condemn the policy of negro 
education until we have established it and until the 
negro has tried it. One who will carefully and accu- 
rately investigate the real conditions of negro life 
may well maintain that those among them who have 
really tried it, who really know something and who 
can really do something, are, on the whole, a credit 
to themselves, to the South, and to their country. 
The great overwhelming masses of them, however, 
have as yet come about as near to illustrating the 
results of education as though education were the 
scourge, rather than the sceptre of broad, efficient, 
and resourceful living. 

Great numbers of them can read a little and write 
a little. But is that education ? Who will presume 
to test the high policies and to dispute the imperative 
validity of education in a democracy, because, for- 
sooth, thousands of witless and idle blacks, after a 
prolonged and convulsive labor of aspiration and per- 
spiration, can just manage to put some kind of a 
vague scrawl upon a piece of soiled paper with a lead 
pencil .'' Yet these people are supposed to show the 
evil result of negro education. Now, it would be hard 
to say just what that much education proves, except 
perhaps that there would be less folly if there were 

F 



66 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

more knowledge.^ But a constructive statesmanship 
may well protest against the insistent and preposter- 
ous assumption that one can ever judge any sort of 
education, negro, Caucasian, or Malay, by seizing a 
random conclusion from the general mob of the uned- 
ucated. There is no test, there can be no test, of the 
policy of the school except in the number and quality 
of those who have at least seriously attempted the 
sacred experiment for which it stands. 

We may well continue to be tolerant of the policy 
of negro education until we ourselves have applied it, 
and until the negro has practised it. 

We may condemn him for his failure to practise it. 
Yet the fault is not wholly his nor ours. The fault 
is not his alone, inasmuch as the public resources of 
the South have been utterly insufficient for the double 
burden placed upon them. As we are told by the 
United States Commissioner of Education, it is es- 
timated that the South, since the year 1870, has 
expended $109,000,000 upon the education of our 
colored people.'-^ And yet it also appears that, for 
these thirty-odd years, the annual school term afforded 
to the negro child has averaged less than seventy 

^ The general social and economic conditions presented by large 
numbers of the colored population render it obviously impossible to 
establish any close relation between mere literacy and crime ; yet Mr. 
Clarence A. Poe, of Raleigh, N.C., clearly shows that even under the 
more adverse conditions the literate negroes are the least criminal 
(^The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1904). There is also a clear dis- 
tinction to be made between literacy and " education. " The greater 
criminality of the negro at the North is due, not to his partial emancipa- 
tion from illiteracy, but to industrial discrimination and to the unwhole- 
some conditions of city life. See p. 186, and note on p. 173. 

2 Report of the United States Commissioner of Education, 1899-1900, 
Vol. II, p. 2501. 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 67 

days. Indeed, the school term for our white children 
in our rural districts has averaged little more. If 
the negro child has had upon the average less than 
three months in which he could go to school, he has 
thus had more than nine months of every year in 
which to forget what he learned. It is hardly wise 
to condemn the policy of negro education, to con- 
demn any policy of religion or culture or statesman- 
ship, upon the basis of so inadequate a trial. 

If the less fortunate results cannot be wholly charged 
against the negro, neither can they be charged against 
the dominant people of the South. Theirs has been 
a task of baffling difficulty and of torturing confusion. 
They have had to re-create their properties before 
they could hope to create those institutions which 
represent, through the resources of taxation, the active 
participation of property in the tasks of government 
and of education. The South has had to get some- 
thing before it could give anything. Yet out of its 
poverty it has given much. The negro, too, has 
given — directly or indirectly. As has already been 
suggested, the rents pay the taxes, and the negro helps 
to pay the rents. 

The negro primary school is the result. 

Before dealing more explicitly with its merits and 
its defects, let me dwell, in passing, upon the argument 
of those — a decreasing number — who oppose the 
negro school, not because it has done too little, but 
because it has done too much. We are told that " it 
has spoiled good field hands by teaching books." 

The charge is in part well founded. It is a charge 
which at one time or another has been brought, in 
every nation in the modern world, against the educa- 



68 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

tion of the agricultural laborer. It has been used so 
long against the training of white men that one need 
not be surprised to hear it made against the training 
of black men. 

Those who are inclined to attribute the animus of 
this objection wholly to what they may call the "race 
prejudice of the South " have too readily forgotten 
the arguments which, within less than half a century, 
have everywhere opposed the education of the indus- 
trial classes. There are those who are always tempted 
to believe that it is the chief business of the poor man 
to remain poor, and of the cheap man or the cheap 
woman to remain cheap. The leisure classes — and 
the employing classes — both North and South are too 
often opposed to any broad realization of an industrial 
or political democracy, and the basis of this opposition 
is a class feeling as well as an economic fear. The 
wonder is, not that such opposition still exists, but that 
it now exists under so many evident modifications. 

As a mere class prejudice, one is indeed under no 
constraint to argue with it. There are those, both in 
England and in America, who have accepted as one 
of the finalities of thought that " shopkeepers," "trades- 
people," and " working-people " must never be any- 
thing else. There are those, North as well as South, 
who are confirmed in the opinion that the negro should 
remain a field hand, a field hand only, and that the 
nine millions of the negro population in our democracy 
are forever to find their industrial function solely in 
menial service or unskilled employments. So impos- 
sible a contention it is unnecessary to discuss. 

But there is also an economic objection to the educa- 
tion of the ag-ricultural laborer at the South. It is true 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 69 

that certain special interests feel that their fortunes 
are involved in the preservation of a labor unin- 
structed and therefore cheap. These interests are in- 
stinctively averse to " the spoiling of field hands," and 
it is altogether probable that where too many establish- 
ments are doing business upon the basis of the lowest 
living wage some of them will have to suffer through 
any differentiation in the mass of their unskilled labor. 
But in any normal diversification of interests there 
will always be enough labor of the cheaper type. 
There is little danger, at the South especially, that 
there will soon be any serious dearth of labor com- 
manding but the lowest wage. Is not this precisely 
the economic difficulty of the South at large .'' A few 
interests may see a peril in the fact that a few of the 
negroes are ceasing to be field hands ; but the South 
as a whole finds a greater peril in the fact that so few 
of them are fit to be anything else. 

For the broader welfare of democracy, involving 
not merely one class but all classes, is not injured by 
the " spoiHng of field hands," if in that process the 
man who was worth but fifty cents a day is changed 
into a man worth a dollar and fifty cents. The pro- 
cess of change has manifestly helped the man himself : 
it has helped the employer, unless he is a victim still 
to the old economic fallacy that the " cheapest " labor 
is the most inexpensive. He will also find, as I have 
suggested, that it is always less difficult to secure 
dozens of men worth a low wage than to secure one 
man who is really worth a higher wage. This indi- 
cates that society wants, because society values, the 
higher wage, — values it not only as a measure of the 
increased efficiency which life demands, but as an 



70 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

effective part in the forming of the wage standard 
of every man who works. We have too long assumed 
that the negro in the fields at fifty cents a day is a 
non-competitor, and that he becomes a competitor 
only when he comes to town, or when he attempts to 
do what white men do. Every man who labors is a 
competitor with every other man who labors. If 
a considerable class in any civihzation are on a fifty- 
cent basis, the tendency of the reward of all employ- 
ments is affected in the direction of that basis. The 
annual salary of the cashier of the largest bank in 
one of the older cities of the South has been but 
^2400 ; near him, in the surrounding territory, are 
thousands of men on a fifty-cent basis. The man 
worth only the low wage in the fields holds down the 
wage of the unskilled laborer in the town, for if the 
town laborer reject his wage the laborer from the fields 
may be summoned to take his place. If the lower 
skilled labor of the town reject its wage, the more 
efficient of the unskilled may easily be substituted, 
and thus on through the ascending scale, rank press- 
ing upon rank, the wage of each advancing or 
depressing the wage of all. 

The remedy, of course, lies not in the crude device 
of paying the fifty-cent man more than he is worth. 
It lies in adding to his wage by first adding to his 
worth. If he is worth more, the employer can afford 
to pay him more. His increasing efficiency bears 
upward against the level of the labor just above him, 
compelling, not merely a higher wage, but a higher 
qualification for that wage ; the ascending competi- 
tion of efficiency is substituted — from level to level 
— for the depressing attraction of inefficiency at the 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 71 

base ; and society, as a whole, moves with a freer 
sense of accomplishment and enters into a broader 
measure of welfare. 

For the man on a fifty-cent basis holds down, not 
only the individual wage, but the collective profit of 
the community. He is upon a basis of mere exist- 
ence, affording no surplus store for wants beyond the 
demands of animal necessity. He has no margin to 
spend. He is not a purchaser because he is hardly 
a producer. Yet commerce is carried on, banks are 
conducted, churches are extended, schools are sup- 
ported, homes are maintained, governments are ad- 
ministered, upon the margin that remains between 
the bare limit of existence and the outer limit of the 
wage. Where great masses of men are worth no 
more than a mere existence they contribute little 
more than a mere existence to society. 

How shall he be worth more, worth more to the 
farmer, worth more to the intimate and interwoven 
fortunes of all labor and all society, — worth more 
not only to himself but to the State, — worth more 
that he may contribute more .■' All the institutions 
of civilization are first to unite in that exacting and 
supremely difficult process by which he is to be trans- 
ferred from the ranks of the incapable to the number 
of the capable. The home, the Church, the press, — 
the play and challenge of the forces of industry, — all 
are to have their part ; but evidently one of the insti- 
tutions upon which society must most largely depend 
for the conduct of this complex and stupendous task 
is that simple, famihar, but much neglected institution, 
the rural common school. 

In the course of this change, many a field hand 



72 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

will be " spoiled," spoiled, not by being made more 
useful, but by being made less useful. This fact can- 
not be forgotten or denied. In every such process 
of transformation there is a fraction of failure. A 
human being is taken out of one economic setting 
and is not transferred successfully to another. It is 
the tragedy of all education, but it is a tragedy of 
education only because it is one of the inevitable 
tragedies of all experience. Surgery saves life, but 
surgery has sacrificed lives in trying to save them. 
The Church labors divinely for belief, but the Church 
has sometimes made men doubters in trying to make 
them Christians. Institutions are not perfect ; men 
are not perfect. Of all men, — when we especially 
consider the exacting demand with which the negro 
in his weakness is confronted in a modern democ- 
racy, — the negro may be expected perhaps to fur- 
nish the largest percentage of failures, of failures in 
that process by which society transforms the masses 
of the inefficient into the efficient. This would be 
true under the best conditions. It is all the more 
naturally and inevitably true when we consider the 
limitations of the chief instrument of this transfor- 
mation, the negro common school. 

Let me dwell first, however, upon some of its 
contributions to this process. It has its manifest 
weaknesses. It may represent strange, grotesque 
misadaptations of theory and method. I often sus- 
pect that the last thing it does is really to educate — 
educate, that is to say, in the word's usual and 
familiar sense. But there is one thing which this 
school does. It represents the first contact, the first 
constraining, upbuilding contact, of the life of civili- 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 73 

zation with the life of the unciviHzed. It serves in 
at least four definite ways (aside from any knowledge 
it may impart) as an institution of moral power in 
the life of every child within its walls. 

(i) It represents the discipline of punctuality. 
When the untutored child first gets into his mind 
the notion of going to a particular place and of 
doing a particular thing at a particular time, he has 
begun to get into line with conscious, intelligent, 
efficient human life. In other words, he has got 
hold of one of the rudimentary assumptions of 
civilization. Is it not of importance to realize 
what a difference lies just here between the state 
of the savage and the state of the citizen } There 
is a moral idea and a moral achievement in the 
notion of punctuality, and the rural primary school 
stands for that. 

(2) It stands, also, for the discipline of order. 
The child finds not only that there is a time to come 
and a time to go, but that there is a place to sit and 
a place not to sit. He finds that there is a place for 
everything, that everything has its place, and that 
even standing and sitting, as well as the whole task 
of behaving, are to be performed under the control 
and direction of another. 

(3) The primary school stands also for the disci- 
pline of silence. For a group of chattering children 
— negro children, any children — there is a moral 
value in the discipline of silence. To learn how to 
keep still, to learn the lesson of self-containment and 
self-command, to get hold of the power of that per- 
sonal calm which is half modesty and half courage, 
to learn a little of the meaning of quiet and some- 



74 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

thing of the secret of listening, — this is an element 
in that supremacy of will which is the faculty and 
privilege of the civilized. 

(4) Finally, the primary school stands for the 
discipline of association. It represents the idea of 
getting together. Getting together is a civiHzing 
exercise. Ten people, old or young, cannot get to- 
gether in a common room for a common purpose 
without every one's yielding something for the sake 
of others — some whim, some impulse of restless- 
ness, some specific convenience, or some personal 
comfort. Human society is a moral achievement. 
Associated effort, however slight the sphere of its 
exercise, represents part of the discipline of civiliza- 
tion. The more ignorant the company, the greater 
is the effort represented, and the more significant the 
lesson. In the primary school, the children learn 
something not only from getting together, but from 
one another. As the teacher, however lowly in 
attainment, is usually at least one rank above the 
pupils, the personality of the teacher makes the con- 
tribution of its influence. No negro school, however 
humble, fails to represent something of this discipline 
of association. 

Now, these things are worth while. The disci- 
pUne of punctuality, the discipline of order, the 
discipline of silence, the discipline of concerted ac- 
tion, — these are elements of merit in the influence 
of our primary educational system which in the 
training of a child-race are worth, of themselves and 
irrespective of the nature and amount of the instruc- 
tion, all the cost of this system to the country and 
to the South. 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 75 

When, however, we touch this system on the side 
of its more positive contribution as an education, its 
faults are conspicuous and formidable. We have 
been giving the negro an educational system which 
is but ill adapted even to ourselves. It has been too 
academic, too much unrelated to practical life, for the 
children of the Caucasian. Yet if this system is ill 
adapted to the children of the most progressive and 
the most efficient of the races of mankind, who shall 
measure the folly of that scholastic traditionalism 
which would persist in applying this system to the 
children of the negro, — and which would then charge 
the partial failure of the application upon those very 
tendencies of the negro which a true educational 
statesmanship might have foreseen, and which a wise 
educational system should have attempted to correct .-* 
If the weaknesses of the negro have made him run 
to the bookish and the decorative in knowledge, we 
must remember that the schooling we have provided 
for him has at least been bookish, even if it has not 
been decorative. 

The South, I think, will face this question and will 
deal with it. We must incorporate into our public 
school system a larger recognition of the practical 
and industrial elements in educational training. Ours 
is an agricultural population. The school must be 
brought more closely to the soil. The teaching of 
history, for example, is all very well ; but nobody can 
really know anything of history unless he has been 
taught to see things grow — has so seen things, not 
only with the outward eye, but with the eyes of his 
intelligence and his conscience. The actual things 
of the present are more important, however, than the 



76 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

institutions of the past. Even to young children can 
be shown the simpler conditions and processes of 
growth, — how corn is put into the ground ; how 
cotton and potatoes should be planted; how to 
choose the soil best adapted to a particular plant, 
how to improve that soil, how to care for the plant 
while it grows, how to get the most value out of it, 
how to use the elements of waste for the fertilization 
of other crops ; how, through the alternation of crops, 
the land may be made to increase the annual value 
of its product ; — these things, upon their elementary 
side, are absolutely vital to the worth and the success 
of hundreds of thousands of these people of the ' 
negro race, and yet our whole educational system has 
practically ignored them. The system which the 
negro has, let us remember, is the system which we 
ourselves have given him. 

I make no adverse criticism of our educational 
authorities. The South's indebtedness to them is 
beyond expression. They are, for the most part, in 
sympathy with such suggestions. The question can 
be reached at last only through the wiser training of 
the teachers ; and, with the teachers actively ranged 
upon the side of such amendments to our educational 
policy, the change will come. Such work will mean, 
not only an education in agriculture, but an education 
through agriculture, an education, through natural 
symbols and practical forms, which will educate as 
deeply, as broadly, and as truly as any other system 
which the world has known. Such changes will 
bring far greater results than the mere improvement 
of our negroes. They will give us an agricultural 
class, a class of tenants or small landowners, trained 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 77 

not away from the soil, but in relation to the soil and 
in intelligent dependence upon its resources. Thus 
the " spoiling of the field hand " will never mean a 
real loss to the lands of the State, but an added force 
of intelligent and productive industry. 

In a number of the fertile agricultural counties of 
the South there has been for twenty years a slight 
but gradual decrease in the per capita wealth of the 
county. The best negroes have been moving away. 
Progress for the negro has come to mean emancipa- 
tion from the soil. The State becomes poorer when 
the lands of the State are left in the care of the idle 
and incapable. This error can be corrected only by 
identifying the negro's progress with his labor, by in- 
creasing his value as a farmer through teaching him 
to farm intelligently and successfully, — by linking 
his interest and his hope directly to the land. As he 
prospers, the larger owner will not have to waive his 
rents. As the tenant comes up, the land comes up 
with him. The successful farmer raises the value 
and the productive power of the soil upon which he 
stands. 

We can get the wealth out of the soil only by put- 
ting into the soil the intelligence and the skill of the 
man who works it. When our tenants and our farm 
labor can mix in their ideas with the land, and can 
put thinking and planning into their ploughing, sow- 
ing, and harvesting, the whole earth begins to lift up 
its head like a pasturage of wealth, happiness, and 
dignity. We must sow something more than seed. 
We must put ideas into the ground if we are to get 
more money out of it. A pound of ideas and another 
pound of hard work will go further than ten pounds 



78 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

of any fertilizer that was ever made. And what is 
the fertilizer but the practical product of an idea ? 

Let me repeat. If the South is to advance the 
wealth of the land, we must advance the practical 
intelligence of the labor which works it. If we are 
to advance the intelligent usefulness of our labor, we 
must go straight to the children. If we are to reach 
the children, we must get hold of them through the 
school. 

If the school is to represent saner methods and a 
wiser educational system, we must begin with the 
training of the teacher. The teacher who teaches 
must be in sympathy with the soil, with honest work, 
with intelligent and fruitful industry, and must be so 
in love with the practical bearing of a practical edu- 
cation upon the concrete life of his people that the 
drift and direction of his training will be toward thrift 
rather than toward idleness. Education, under such 
a teacher, will represent, as has been said, " not a 
means of escaping labor, but a means of making it 
more effective." This is where we touch upon the 
contribution of Hampton and Tuskegee. 

These are industrial normal schools, schools for 
the finding and equipment of just such teachers. 
They are, primarily, institutions for teacher-training. 
They are not, primarily, institutions for the training 
of domestic servants. Schools for instruction in 
domestic service might well be founded by their 
graduates in some of the larger cities of the South. 
I hope that that may be. But the white race is pro- 
viding few teachers for our population of nearly eight 
millions of negroes. The teaching of their countless 
children — through the policy and the preference of 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 79 

the South herself — is left to negroes. Hampton and 
Tuskegee are trying to better the quality and to 
increase the technical and practical value of these 
teachers. If these two schools could dojible the out- 
put of their work, they would be touching but the 
remoter limits of this stupendous task. Theirs is the 
work of the education of these teachers through prac- 
tical methods and industrial forms, in order that they 
may go forth to this backward people in our rural 
South, and there may train the children in the intel- 
ligent use of the soil, of concrete objects, and of 
natural forces, so that, as there comes about the ris- 
ing of this race, the whole land may rise with it, — 
the true progress of the negro thus representing, not 
the fattening of the industrial parasite, but that whole- 
some and creative growth which will capitalize the 
life of the State with the skilled hands and the pro- 
ductive capacity of its masses. 

III. Is there any danger in the coincident industrial 
development of our two races } There are those who 
tell us so. Many of the same men who assured us, 
ten years ago, that industrial education is the only 
education the negro should have, are now ready with 
the assurance that for fear the industrial development 
of the negro will clash with that of the white man, 
this form of negro training is the most dangerous 
contribution that has thus far been made to the solu- 
tion of our Southern problems. The poor negro ! 
The man who would keep him in ignorance and then 
would disfranchise him because he is ignorant must 
seem to him as a paragon of erect and radiant con- 
sistency, when compared with the man who first tells 



8o THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

him he must work, and then tells him he must not 
learn how. 

He tells the negro he must make shoes, but that 
he must not make shoes which people can wear ; that 
he may be a wheelwright, but that he must make 
neither good wheels nor salable wagons ; that he 
must be a farmer, but that he must not farm well. 
According to this fatuous philosophy of our situation, 
we are to find the true ground of interracial harmony 
when we have proved to the negro that it is useless 
for him to be useful, and only after we have consist- 
ently sought the negro's industrial contentment on 
the basis of his industrial despair. 

The South had no trouble with her slaves before 
the war ; we had no trouble with them during the 
war, even when our women were left largely at their 
mercy. We had no trouble with them after the war, 
till the carpet-bagger from the North came down 
upon them. They were a peaceful and helpful peo- 
ple because slavery had at least taught them how to 
do something and how to do it well. The industrial 
education of the negro is intended to supply, under 
the conditions of freedom, those elements of skill, 
those conditions of industrial peace, which our fathers 
supplied under the conditions of slavery. It is not 
without significance that no graduate of Hampton or 
Tuskegee has ever been charged with assault upon 
a woman. 

We must not forget, however, that the critic of our 
negroes still further arraigns them because, in Ala- 
bama, for example, while constituting over 45 per 
cent of the population, they pay perhaps less than 5 
per cent of the direct taxes ; yet, strangely enough, the 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 8l 

same man declaims in the next breath on the peril of the 
negro's industrial rivalry. For thirty years this type of 
the arraignment of the negro has paid the negro the 
tribute of its fear, and has insulted the white man by 
its assumption of his industrial impotence. Certainly 
it should seem conspicuously evident that if there is 
one thing the South need not fear at present, it is 
any general or too rapid increase in the productive 
efficiency of the masses of her negroes. Her peril, 
as has already been suggested, lies in precisely the 
opposite direction. It is certainly no tribute to the 
Caucasian to assume that his own proud and historic 
race, with its centuries of start and the funded culture 
of all civilization at its command, cannot keep ahead 
of the negro, no matter what the negro can know or 
do. The only real peril of our situation lies, not in 
any aspect of the negro's wise and legitimate prog- 
ress, but rather in the danger that the negro will 
know so little, will do so little, and will increasingly 
care so little about either knowing or doing, that the 
great black mass of his numbers, his ignorance, his 
idleness, and his lethargy will drag forever like a 
cancerous and suffocating burden at the heart of our 
Southern life. And yet, were the industrial develop- 
ment of the negro tenfold as rapid and twentyfold as 
general in its scope, should we then be compelled to 
witness the predicted annihilation of the weaker race 
at the hands of our industrial mob .'' I think not. 
The native qualities of the negro persist as his 
protective genius. Whenever the negro has looked 
down the lane of annihilation, he has always had the 
good sense to go around the other way. " The 
negro," says Mr. Dooley, "has many fine qualities; 



82 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

he is joyous, light-hearted, and aisily lynched." But 
the last of these qualities is individual, not collective. 
He avoids its expression by avoiding the occasion for 
its exercise. If Burke was right in saying that we 
cannot indict a whole people, it is also true that we 
cannot lynch a whole race, especially when this race 
has a preference for amnesty, will accept in the 
white man's country the place assigned him by the 
white man, will do his work, not by stress of rivalry, 
but by genial cooperation with the white man's inter- 
ests, will take the job allotted him in that division of 
the world's work which is made by the white man's 
powers, and will do that work so well that the white 
man can make more from it by leaving it with the 
negro than by doing it himself. Such has been the 
working principle of the industrial coordination of 
these races, North as well as South. It is a principle 
which I have here stated in its crudest form. It is 
often modified by especial consideration on the one 
side, and by especial efficiency on the other. But 
the principle itself runs back into the nature of men 
and the nature of things. 

A weaker race dwelling in the land of a stronger 
race makes no war upon the stronger, creates no 
critical social or industrial issues, takes the place as- 
signed it in the political, social, and industrial economy 
of the land. The negro will prove himself so useful, 
so valuable to the country, to humanity, that the 
world will want him to live. He will not invite ex- 
tinction through industrial exasperations, through 
self-assertive competitions. He gives way. He 
comes back upon another track. He fits into his 
own niche. The increase of his efficiency increases 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 83 

the possible points of his adaptation to the world's 
work. The world holds more of work than of workers, 
and the more varied the opportunities for work, the 
more chance for all the workers. Industrial conflicts 
are found in their acutest form, not in the complex 
fields which only the few can occupy and where the 
principle of the division of labor is most fully recog- 
nized, but in the elementary tasks which almost every 
man can perform, and in which all the unfitted are 
fitted for competition. 

The field of competition is narrowed as the field 
for differentiation is broadened. As we touch the 
tasks of skill, we touch the keys of industrial har- 
mony. The negro comes with his skill to our indus- 
trial organization ; the world gives him his place. 
He takes it. He demands, he can demand, no more 
than the world gives him. Whatever it may be, it is 
his lot ; and he accepts it. This is not cowardice. 
Our negroes have fought well in war. It is some- 
thing deeper than cowardice. It is something deeper 
than self-preservation. It is a profounder, a more 
constructive impulse. It is self-conservation. It is 
life. 

And we need not dwell too much upon the theories 
of alarm. There is nothing more weakly theoretic than 
a theoretic fear. The apprehensions which have at- 
tended the progress of the negro have usually come to 
nothing with the arrival of the facts. Just as it was 
"conclusively established," before the general use of 
the locomotive, that passengers going faster than 
twenty miles an hour would certainly perish " from 
lack of breath," so it was confidently argued that the 
negroes when emancipated would rise and slay the 



84 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

women and children of their absent masters. Some 
of the Nation's wisest men thought that emancipation 
would lead to slaughter. Later, it was contended 
that the immediate and universal bestowal of the 
ballot — an act of unpardonable folly — would lead 
to interracial war. But the oft-predicted " negro 
rising " has never come. It is always well in deal- 
ing with the negro, or with any factor of experience, 
to determine one's policy, not from the possible re- 
sults which one fears it may produce, but from the 
actual results which one may see it docs produce. 

Here are the negroes of our representative South- 
ern communities. Does the South have serious 
difficulty with those who really know something and 
who can really do something } Which class of ne- 
groes is the greater menace to our peace, — the 
negroes who have the scores of little homes through 
the better negro districts of our Southern cities, who 
are increasing their earnings, sending their children to 
school, buying clothes, furniture, carpets, groceries, 
chiefly from the white man's stores and to the white 
man's profit ; or those negroes whose industry is 
indeed no competitive menace to the most sensitive, 
who, if they are without ambitions, are equally with- 
out excellences, who are unskilled enough to satisfy 
the most timorous, who work three days that they 
may loaf four, who may be responsible for several 
families, but who are without a sense of responsibil- 
ity for even one, who are without pride except the 
pride of the indolent and the insolent .'' Which class 
of negroes chiefly figures in the police records and 
makes the chief burden upon our courts .-' Which 
class of negroes constitutes, therefore, the real peril 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 85 

of our situation, the efficient or the inefficient ? 
— the negro who is making real progress, or the 
negro who is making none ? The one class adds 
little to the wealth and much to the burdens and 
perplexities of the State ; the other is the most 
adaptable and tractable element in the race, and it 
adds by everything it produces, by everything it 
buys or sells, to the volume of business and to the 
wealth of the community. 

We are sometimes tempted to go off upon a false 
and hopeless quest. We at times imagine that the 
two classes of negroes between which the South may 
choose are the old-time darky and the present-day 
negro. But practically there is no such alternative 
for us to-day. We must clearly see, many of us with 
sorrow, that the old-time darky is forever gone. 
He was the product of the conditions of slavery, con- 
ditions which no man at the South could or would 
restore. We cannot choose between the old-time 
darky and the new. The South, in the exercise of 
a practical responsibility, must necessarily make its 
choice between the two classes of the new : the 
class of quiet, sensible, industrious men and women 
(as yet a minority, but a minority steadily increasing) 
who seek through intelligence and skill to be useful 
to themselves and to their country ; and the class, 
upon the other hand, which is backward, thriftless, 
profitless — which draws from the land or the com- 
munity only what it may consume — which creates no 
wealth because it has no needs, which furnishes the 
murderer, the rapist, the loafer, the incendiary — 
which presents no theoretic competition for the job 
of our skilled laborer largely because this class of 



86 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

negroes is not much possessed of any skill nor much 
enamored of any conceivable job. There are just 
two classes of negroes in our land to-day, those who 
are going forward and those who are going back- 
ward. I have little doubt as to the choice which the 
South will make. 

The somewhat morbid fear of the negro's industrial 
education would never have arisen but for the preva- 
lence of the economic error that the volume of the 
world's work is fixed in quantity, and that if the negro 
does a part of it, there will be less of it for the white 
man. But one man's work does not reduce the vol- 
ume of the work open to other men. Every man's 
work produces work for all. Every laborer who 
is really a producer represents a force which is en- 
larging the market for labor. The man who makes 
a table broadens the opportunities of industry be- 
hind him and before him. He helps to make work 
for the man who fells the trees, for the man who 
hauls the trees to the sawmill, for those in the mills 
who dress the timber for his use, for those who dig and 
shape the iron which goes into the nails he drives ; 
he makes work for the man who provides the glue, 
the stains, and the varnish, for the man who owns the 
table at the shop, for the drummer who tells about it, 
for the men who sell food and apparel to those who 
handle it and who profit by its repeated sales from 
the factory to the wholesaler, from the wholesaler to 
the retailer, and from the retailer to the final pur- 
chaser. The man who makes a table makes business. 
The man who makes shoes or harness or tools or 
wagons makes business. The work of the trained 
producer does not restrict the market of labor. It 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 87 

enlarges that market. The friction sometimes due to 
the negro's possession of a lower standard of living 
passes away as the negro advances in real education 
and genuine skill. As he begins to work productively, 
he begins to live better. He is not like the myriad 
labor of the Orient which never accepts American 
standards. As the negro goes up, his standard of 
living goes up. There will never be any question 
about the negro being a consumer. He is ever a 
free spender. To strengthen him, upon wise lines, 
as an American producer will add not only to his 
capacity to work, but to his capacity to buy, and both 
what he produces and what he purchases will directly 
contribute to the wealth and peace of the community 
and the State. 

And what, let us ask, is the alternative ? If, in 
dealing with these people, we are not to seek the re- 
sults of stability and harmony in the conditions of in- 
telligence and industry, where and how may we seek 
them .'' Is there a sound basis for stability and har- 
mony in these great black masses of ignorance and 
idleness that we find about us ? Have prosperity, 
peace, happiness, ever been successfully and perma- 
nently based upon indolence, inefficiency, and hopeless- 
ness .'' Since time began, has any human thing that 
God has made taken damage to itself or brought 
damage to the world through knowledge, truth, hope, 
and honest toil ? Industrial activity is the best secur- 
ity for industrial harmony. The world at work is the 
world at peace. 

The negro has his weaknesses. He has his virtues. 
He is not here because he chose this land of ours. 
The land chose him. We can abandon this task, 



88 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

but it cannot abandon us. It is the grave but un- 
escapable privilege of our Southern States to take it 
and to work out through it, as the stewards of our 
country's power and our country's will, one of the 
greatest national obligations of American life. 

What trait among the negro's weaknesses is made 
better by idleness, hopelessness, and industrial help- 
lessness .'' What trait among his virtues is destroyed 
by right thinking, by real knowledge, by the capacity 
to see clearly and to work successfully .'' God made 
him a man. We cannot and we dare not make him 
less. But we may not be self-deceived. If we are 
to make him all he may become, we have before us a 
task of immeasurable and appalling difficulty, a task 
more difficult than that attempted by the armies of 
the North when they moved against the South, a task 
more difficult than tha.t of those heroic armies of the 
South which withstood the North, but a task which 
the higher and holier purpose of the North and of the 
South, in response to the challenge of our children 
and of humanity, will yet perform. Its difficulty is 
not a reason why we shall fail. It is the reason why 
we shall succeed. The sore strain and trial of such a 
task will touch, not merely the chords of our compas- 
sion, but the metal of our manhood, and the thing 
will be done — done wisely, justly, courageously, 
and with the patience of a great country's love — 
just because it was so hard to do. 



A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 89 



III 

I have dwelt thus long upon the subject of negro 
education partly because many of the principles in- 
volved are to a degree identical with the principles 
involved in the education of the unprivileged masses 
of our white people, partly because the Southern 
policy of negro education invites a fuller discussion 
than any policy of white education can require. 

What is true, however, of the negro masses is 
largely true of the white masses. With the few 
necessary qualifications, everything that has here been 
said in behalf of a more practical educational system 
for the negro school may be said in behalf of similar 
changes in the rural schools of our white people. 
The differences in racial heritage should be recog- 
nized. Certain forms of industrial training may be 
emphasized the more clearly with the masses of our 
negroes ; certain forms of scholastic training may be 
emphasized the more clearly with our white children. 
The two races are not the same, and they will not re- 
spond in the same way to precisely similar influences. 
The average negro child starts much farther back 
than the average white child. To recognize that fact 
and to educate as though we recognized it is not cru- 
elty to the negro, but the fairest and tenderest kind- 
ness. Nor does this mean that the negro is always 
to have a poorer quality of education. A difference 
in form, in the interest of a closer adaptability to 
need, should represent, not the reduction, but the 
preservation of the wisest and truest educational 
standards. 



go THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

The racial heritage of the white man must be 
clearly accepted and recognized in the form of his 
educational system ; and yet a white population so 
largely dependent on its agricultural resources and 
its productive industry must bring its public educa- 
tion into more articulate relations with the soil and 
with its work. If the South needs to secure the 
sounder industrial progress of her negroes, she must 
be sure that the industrial progress of the great masses 
of her white people is given a support which shall be 
even more resourceful in its enthusiasm and even 
more aggressive in its activities. 

The relation of the system of public education to 
the needs of an agricultural people is a subject 
which has engaged the consideration of the great 
States of the West just as it must engage the atten- 
tion of the South. 1 But there is this significant and 
striking difference. The West, since 1870, has re- 
ceived an efficient foreign white population of more 
than 5,000,000 souls. The South is gaining compar- 
atively little from white immigration. In 1900 the 

1 There is much of practical value in the Report for the year ending 
June 30, 1900, of the State Superintendent of Education for Wiscon- 
sin. Those who may be interested in the general methods already 
adopted in Ireland, France, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, 
and Germany may well turn, among the documents of the same State, 
to the Report of the Commissioner appointed by the Legislature of 
Wisconsin in 1899 "to investigate and report upon the methods of 
procedure in this and other States and countries in giving instruction 
in manual training and in the theory and art of agriculture in the pub- 
lic schools." Among practical elementary manuals on the subject of 
agriculture may be mentioned : " Principles of Agriculture," by L. H. 
Bailey; "Agriculture for Beginners," by Burket, Stevens, and Hill of 
Raleigh, N.C. (Ginn & Co.); and "Rural School Agriculture," by W. 
M. Hays. 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 91 

five Southern States — Alabama, Georgia, Missis- 
sippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina — had, in 
a total population of over 8,800,000 souls, only 
44,996 of the foreign-born. In the small State of 
Vermont, with a total population of only 343,641, 
there were 44,747. In the single State of Kansas 
there were 126,685 of the foreign-born; in the one 
State of Nebraska there were 177,347; in the State 
of Ohio there were 458,734.^ 

It is from the ranks of the masses of our own peo- 
ple (if we are to have a sound and vigorous economic 
development) that we must largely secure, not only 
the populations of the market and the professions, 
but the more intelligent populations of our shops and 
fields. We must put at the command of our humbler 
white people — perhaps I had best say our prouder 
white people — an educational system freed from the 
follies of inadequacy upon the one hand and of mis- 
adaptation upon the other. The stores of our fields 
and our mines will be of small avail unless the skill 
and equipment which shall transmute them into 
wealth are exercised within the borders of the South, 
in loyal and affectionate attachment to her interests 
and her happiness. 

Upon the necessity and the policy of white educa- 
tion, we are practically agreed. And yet the possi- 
bihty of neglect is also present here. It is not that 
danger of neglect which comes from bitter and defi- 
nite aversion, but the more subtle peril of vaguely 
assuming that a work upon which everybody is 
agreed is somehow going to be performed just 
because we are agreed upon it. There is in mere 

^ See also Table VII of the Appendix, p. 304, columns 4 and 5. 



92 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

agreement no real dynamic of social progress. 
There is little moral power in the universal affirma- 
tion that two and two make four. Our need to-day 
in behalf of the unprivileged masses of the rural 
South is not that we shall agree upon education, but 
that we shall educate. 

The task before the South is one of conspicuous 
magnitude. Striking an average for the eleven 
States of the secession, we have found that of the 
native white population ten years old and over 12.2 
per cent cannot read and write ; while in North 
Carolina and Louisiana — and Alabama is not far 
ahead, — one white person in every six is recorded 
as illiterate. No other eleven States in the Union 
anywhere nearly approximate this condition. , In all 
the States outside of the South, taken together as a 
group, the average rate of illiteracy among the native 
white population is only 2.8 per cent as against 12.2 
per cent of native white ilhteracy in the South. 
The negroes are not here included. These figures 
deal with none other than the native white popula- 
tion. If we add to these figures the number of our 
white people who can just pass the test of literacy, 
who perhaps can barely sign their names, but who 
are practically iUiterate, our conditions are seen to 
be still more serious. 

And yet the hope of democracy in the life of the 
South to-day lies in the fact, as we have seen, that 
among increasing multitudes of men the agreement 
to educate is passing into conviction. The percen- 
tage of white illiteracy is large, but it is to-day de- 
creasing. From 1880 to 1890, according to the 
United States census, the percentage of illiteracy in 



Ill A CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMANSHIP 93 

the native white population ten years of age and over 
was reduced from 22.7 per cent to 15.9 per cent. 
From 1890 to 1900 it was reduced from 15.9 to 12.2 
per cent. The reduction of this percentage within 
the next ten years will be even more striking. The 
great host of the non-participants is entering into 
its own. 

A political statesmanship is recognizing that the 
desire of the people is the education of all the people, 
and that the political influence of the South is to be 
advanced by no merely negative devices of resistance, 
but by the South's intelligent and positive contribu- 
tion to the great national decisions upon economic 
and party issues. Quality, as well as quantity, must 
always enter into the subtle influence of constituen- 
cies. An educational statesmanship is perceiving 
that, as the people come to know, the opportunity of 
the university is enlarged. And the common schools 
contribute to the university something more than an 
increasing practical support. The university in the 
South is beginning to appreciate the vital relation 
between a sympathetic culture and common need, 
realizing as never before that the ideals of the higher 
learning cannot flourish in freedom or in fruitfulness 
save in the responsive atmosphere of a popular faith 
in ideas and a popular kinship with the scholar's 
spirit. A religious statesmanship perceives that the 
mission of Christ was to the largeness as well as to 
the rectitude of life, that breadth and sweetness of 
temper find a deeper security in the inheritance of the 
educated man, and that what every citizen claims 
in his heart for his own children he must desire as 
instinctively for the children of another. The states- 



94 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, hi 

manship of our public press is perceiving that in the 
existence of a generally educated public opinion there 
reside some of the secrets of editorial independence, 
of adequate circulation, of broader journalistic power. 
An industrial statesmanship is declaring that the 
South's largest undeveloped wealth lies in its unde- 
veloped populations. 

Public education, as the primary policy of the 
South, is thus presenting, not merely an opportunity 
and a duty ; it presents a policy of investment — wise 
and sacred and secure. A constructive statesman- 
ship — a statesmanship of educational and religious 
insight, of political sagacity, of economic validity — 
is informing and renewing the life of the land ; and 
not alone in the heritage of the past or in the wealth 
of fields and forests and mines, but in the promise of 
the forgotten child of the people, the enlarging 
democracy finds its charter. 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND 
CHILD LABOR 



CHAPTER IV 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 



The present industrial development of the South 
is not a new creation. It is chiefly a revival. Be- 
cause the labor system of the old South was so largely 
attended by the economic disadvantages of slavery, 
and because the predominant classes of the white 
population were so largely affected by social and 
political interests, it has often been assumed that the 
old order was an order without industrial ambitions. 

The assumption is not well founded. Instead of 
industrial inaction, we find from the beginnings of 
Southern history an industrial movement, character- 
istic and sometimes even provincial in its methods, 
but presenting a consistent and creditable develop- 
ment up to the very hour of the Civil War. The 
issue of this war meant no mere economic reversal. 
It meant economic catastrophe, drastic, desolate, with- 
out respect of persons, classes, or localities. And yet 
through all the phases of catastrophe there still re- 
mained the essential factors of the old prosperity — 
the land and its peoples. Thus the later story of the 
industrial South is but a story of reemergence. 

Without some conception of the industrial interests 
of the old South, the story of the later South is, how- 
H 97 



98 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ever, not easily understood. It is, for example, to 
Colonel William Byrd of Westover, known more 
recently in the pages of fiction, that we are indebted 
for some of the interesting particulars as to the 
early development of the iron properties of Virginia. 
Writing in 1732, he tells us, among others, of "Eng- 
land's iron mines, called so from the chief manager 
of them, though the land belongs to Mr. Washington." 
These mines were about twelve miles from Fred- 
ericksburg. A furnace was not far away. " Mr. 
Washington," says Colonel Byrd, "raises the ore and 
carts it thither for twenty shillings the ton of iron 
that it yields. Besides Mr. Washington and Mr. 
England, there are several other persons concerned 
in these works. Matters are very well managed there, 
and no expense is spared to make them profitable." 
This " Mr. Washington," thus one of the earliest 
factors in the iron industry of the South, was the 
father of our first President.^ 

Before 1720 Governor Spottswood of Virginia had 
established several iron-making enterprises, and the 
General Assembly of Virginia had passed, in 1727, 
"an act for encouraging adventurers in iron-works." 
Not only in Virginia, but in North Carohna and 

1 Quoted in " Facts About the South," by R. H. Edmonds, Balti- 
more, 1902, from Swank's " History of Iron in all Ages." To Mr. 
Edmonds's interesting brochure and to the columns of the Tradesman 
of Chattanooga, as well as to the several issues of the United States 
census, I am indebted for many of the statements in the first section 
of this chapter. I especially wish to express my obligations to Mr. 
Edmonds. It should be said, however, that the figures as to the 
assessed value of Southern property in i860 include the wealth which 
existed in the form of slaves. This should be borne in mind in noting 
the contrasts here quoted on p. loi. See also the footnote to p. 41. 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 99 

South Carolina as well, there continued — until the 
close of the century — much interest in the develop- 
ment of this phase of manufacturing, and the colonial 
forces made frequent requisitions upon its product. 

In 1795, however, there had been developed an in- 
vention which began to transform the conditions of 
Southern life. Eli Whitney — a native of Massachu- 
setts then living in Georgia — gave to the world the 
cotton-gin. With its introduction, cotton became the 
dominant interest of the South. Other enterprises 
suffered by comparison, as men came to realize the 
increased availability given by Whitney to the cotton 
product, and the increased value thus contributed to 
the cotton lands. From 2,000,000 pounds in 1790, the 
cotton crop rose to 10,000,000 pounds in 1796, and 
to 40,000,000 pounds in 1800. Ten years later, the 
crop amounted to 80,000,000 pounds, and by 1820 it 
had reached the enormous total — as contrasted with 
the yield of 1790 — of 160,000,000 pounds. 

Nor was this astonishing increase of thirty years 
coincident with " four-cent cotton." For nearly forty 
years, beginning with 1800 and closing with 1839, the 
average price per pound was over seventeen cents — 
forty-four cents per pound being the maximum price 
attained, and thirteen cents the minimum. 

During this period it was inevitable that the cotton 
interest should have become the all-absorbing occu- 
pation of the South. Beginning, however, with 1840 
we may note a sharp decline in prices — reaching in 
1845 a point slightly lower than six cents — and while 
from time to time the price rallied feverishly for brief 
and uncertain periods, there was no general recovery. 
The average price for the ten years, from 1840 to 



loo THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

1850, was the lowest average maintained throughout 
any decade in the history of the American trade. 

The same causes, therefore, which had drawn the 
energy of the South in so conspicuous a degree to 
cotton, were now operating partially to detach the 
South from cotton and to secure the direction of 
Southern effort upon other enterprises. Accordingly 
in the decade from 1850 to i860 — the ten years im- 
mediately preceding the Civil War — we find a marked 
and rapid development in the South 's general agri- 
cultural and manufacturing interests. According to 
the United States census of i860, — as Mr. Edmonds 
has pointed out, ■ — the South, with one-third of the 
country's population and less than one-fourth of the 
white population, had raised more than one-half of 
the total agricultural products of the country. The 
total number of Southern factories in i860 was 24,590, 
representing an aggregate capital of $17 S, 100,000. In 
1850 the South had but 2335 miles of railroad as 
contrasted with a combined total of 4798 miles for 
New England and the Middle States; but by i860 
the South had quadrupled the mileage of 1850, and, 
while the total for New England and the Middle 
States now reached 9510 miles, the South had 
achieved a total of 9897 miles. In 1850 the com- 
bined mileage of the two Northern sections had ex- 
ceeded that of the South by 2463 miles. In i860 
these conditions were reversed, and the South had a 
margin of 387 miles to her credit. The railroad de- 
velopment of the decade at the South represented an 
expenditure, largely from Southern sources, of over 
$220,000,000. 

Then came war and the more bitter years that fol- 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR loi 

lowed war. In i860 the wealth of the South had 
exceeded the combined wealth of the New England 
and Middle States by ^750,000,000, but in 1870 we 
find the conditions reversed and the wealth of these 
States exceeding the wealth of the South by ^10,- 
800,000,000. 

" The assessed value of property in New York and 
Pennsylvania in 1870 was greater than in the whole 
South. South Carolina, which, in i860, had been 
third in rank in wealth, in proportion to the number 
of her inhabitants, had dropped to be the thirtieth ; 
Georgia had dropped from seventh to the thirty- 
ninth ; Mississippi, from the fourth place to the 
thirty-fourth ; Alabama, from the eleventh to the 
forty-fourth; Kentucky, from tenth to twenty-eighth." 

The decrease in values at the South had been coin- 
cident with an increase in values at the North. In 
i860 the value of assessed property in South Caro- 
lina exceeded by $68,000,000 the combined totals 
for Rhode Island and New Jersey. But in 1870 
the assessed property of Rhode Island and New 
Jersey exceeded by more than $685,000,000 the 
assessed value of the properties of South Carolina. 

Beneath these cold and unresponsive figures there 
lie what tragedies of suffering, what deep-hidden 
recurrent pulses of despair, of self-repression, of pa- 
tience, of silent and solemn will, of self-conquest, of 
ultimate emancipation ! 

About the year 1880 the long-waited change be- 
gins. By 1890 the industrial revival is in evident 
progress. By igoo the South has entered upon one 
of the most remarkable periods of economic develop- 
ment to be found in the history of the modern indus- 



I02 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

trial world. This is not over-statement. It is fair 
and accurate characterization. 

The agricultural progress of these twenty years has 
been more than creditable as compared with the totals 
for the country at large. But the most distinctive ele- 
ment in the economic movement of this period is the 
increasingly dominant position of manufactures as 
contrasted with agriculture. This industrial revival 
is but the reemergence of the tendency which we 
found so manifest in the statistics of i860. It is but 
one reassertion of the genius of the old South. 

In 1880 the value of the manufactured products 
of the South was $200,000,000 less than the value 
of her agricultural products. But in 1900 all this is 
changed. The value of Southern manufactures then 
exceeded the value of Southern agricultural products 
by $190,000,000, and "if mining interests be in- 
cluded, by nearly $300,000,000." 

In 1880 the products of Southern factories had not 
reached a valuation of $458,000,000. By 1900, such 
had been the progress of twenty years, their value 
had reached a total of more than $1,463,000,000 — 
an increase of $1,200,000,000, or more than 220 per 
cent. To realize the deep and far-reaching signifi- 
cance of such figures, one must be able to see through 
them — by the faculties of an intelligent and sympa- 
thetic insight — the vast industrial and social changes 
which they represent. They mean that the industrial 
centre of gravity at the South is shifting, however 
slowly, from the field to the factory ; and that the 
factory is to take its place beside the church, the school- 
house, the home, as one of the effectual and charac- 
teristic forces of civilization in our Southern States. 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 103 



II 

By " the factory " the average Southern community 
understands the cotton factory. To the eye, m the new- 
industrial scene, it is the most conspicuous represen- 
tative of the South's industrial transformation. In 
the twenty years from 1880 to 1900, the capital in- 
vested in cotton manufacturing at the South increased 
from nearly $22,000,000 to nearly $113,000,000, and 
the number of establishments had increased from 180 
to 412. So rapid, however, has been the growth of 
this especial interest of the South, that since the tak- 
ing of the census for 1900 the number of cotton mill 
estabhshments has reached, in January, 1904, a total 
of over 900, — has already more than doubled. 

This astonishing development has been due to 
many causes, — to the South's possession of the raw- 
material, and thus to the partial truth of the adage 
that "the mills must come to the cotton;" to the 
South's vast store of available and inexpensive fuels, 
her ample water-powers, her attractive and " easy " 
climate ; but chiefly to her supplies of tractable and 
cheap labor. It is this last factor, rather than the 
possession of the raw material, which has contributed 
to the rapid development of cotton manufacture in 
our Southern States. 

What is the source of this labor ? It lies in the 
unlettered masses of the white population. The 
negro population forms but an infinitesimal fraction 
of it. Their practical omission from the labor of the 
cotton mills is attributed to a number of causes, — to 
the inadaptability of the negro to the long hours and 



I04 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the sustained labor of the factory system ; to the 
desire of the Southern captains of industry to favor, 
upon the grounds of sentiment, the training and em- 
ployment of white labor ; to the fact that, inasmuch 
as it is often difficult to employ the two classes of 
labor together, and as white labor — by reason of 
its teachableness, endurance, and skill — is the more 
valuable of the two, the preference is naturally given 
to the stronger race. It is probable that all these 
considerations, in greater or less degree, have entered 
as determining factors into the situation as we find it, 
although it is to the last that I should be inclined to 
attribute the chief measure of importance. But the 
situation, whatever the explanations, is what it is. 
Men may not agree as to the alleged causes, or as to 
their respective validity, but the fact remains, that 
thus far the characteristic labor of the cotton factory 
has been almost wholly white. 

Upon a personal investigation of a large number 
of mills, one will find, among managers, superin- 
tendents, and foremen, the representatives of almost 
every social class. Although the mill can hardly be 
called the instrument of an industrial democracy, 
there will sometimes be found men in the ranks of 
factory administration who have worked themselves 
forward from the vague multitude of the unlettered 
and unskilled. It is from this multitude, however, — 
from the great army of the non-participants, — that 
the population of the factory is chiefly drawn. From 
their little homes in the " hill-country " of the Pied- 
mont, where for years they have maintained a pre- 
carious existence upon a difficult and forbidding soil, 
thousands of them have been drawn within the 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 105 

precincts of the new industrial life. Some of them 
have come from the heavier lands in the malarial 
sections of the " Black Belt." Whether from the 
hills or from the valleys, — and most of them are 
a "hill-people," — they have sometimes found in the 
factory an instrument of industrial rescue. In many 
instances, however, the change from agriculture — 
however hard the old life — has represented a loss of 
freedom without a compensating gain of ease. I 
have known cases where the bright promises of the 
factory's labor agent have lured families from their 
little holdings of poor land to a fate even more dreary 
and more pitiless. In other cases the change has 
represented more of gain than of loss. The family 
has found in the opportunity presented by the mill 
a new chance for a real foothold in the struggle for 
existence. Having failed under the conditions of 
agriculture, it has found under the conditions of 
manufacture at least the possibility of another world. 

On the farm the whole family has usually worked 
together, and so the family still remains, under the 
changed conditions, the working unit. Often at the 
week's end they will find themselves in possession 
of more real money than they have seen in months 
before, and, not clearly perceiving that more of 
money does not always mean more of life, — an error 
not unusual among more favored classes, — and feel- 
ing the magic spell of fellowship, of closer social con- 
tact with other human souls and other human forces, 
they soon forget whatever of advantage the old life 
may have contained. 

Nor is the promise of the new world always vain. 
With some the possibilities of promotion are per- 



lo6 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ceived, and steadily and sometimes successfully pur- 
sued. The more important factories are now seldom 
found without the factory school, where — in spite of 
the many calls to the mill, to meet the exigencies 
of " rush orders " — the children, or a fraction of 
them, are given an elementary training in "the three 
R's." When the more ambitious boy or the more 
capable girl is advanced to " piece-work," the result 
of an active day is often a gratifying wage. But the 
period of satisfactory earning power reaches its maxi- 
mum at about the eighteenth or nineteenth year, and 
the operative is held by the rewards of the industry 
at the only time when another career might seem 
possible and practicable. When it is clearly per- 
ceived that the strain of the long factory hours does 
not bring a really satisfactory adult wage, it is too 
late to change ; and the few who pass upward in the 
mill are but a small proportion of the mass. These, 
under the pressure of the economic situation just 
suggested, yield to that class tendency which is just 
as active among the poor as among the rich. The 
forces of a common origin, of neighborhood life, of 
a social experience shut in by the factory enclosure, 
— with no opportunity for the home, that best basis 
of social differentiation, — all conspire to emphasize 
the distinctions and the barriers of caste, and we find 
in process of creation a " factory people." They are 
marked by certain characteristic excellences and by 
certain characteristic evils. I would not forget the 
first in dwelling here upon the latter. There will be 
found among them, in frequent and appalling evi- 
dence, two symbols of a low industrial life, — the 
idle father and the working child. 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 107 

Neither could exist without the partial complicity 
of the mills. The adult men among the new recruits 
have untrained hands and awkward fingers. The 
younger children are taken at first as the " pupils 
of the industry," but the mills have clung to them 
with a tenacity which indicates that while their im- 
mediate labor may be profitless, the net rewards of 
their "instruction" do not fall exclusively to the 
children. Upon the little farm among the hills the 
family worked and lived close to the very limit of 
existence. The father, there, had often done the 
hunting and the fishing while the women and the 
children labored. The family earnings in the new 
environment at the mill present a small but appreci- 
able margin. As there has rarely been a thought or 
a plan beyond a little fuller measure of subsistence, — 
subsistence of the same kind and according to the 
same standards, — it is now obviously possible when 
this measure is attained for some one in the number 
of the workers to "fall out." The father does not 
seem to be seriously in demand, the children are. 
The member of the family who ceases work is thus 
not the youngest, but the oldest. If the father has 
never entered the mill, — as is sometimes the case, — 
and if there still appears a little margin in the family 
wage beyond the limit of subsistence, the one who 
falls out is the mother. The children work on. 

Have they not always worked upon the farm, and 
upon the farm have not their fathers and forefathers 
worked before them ? Wrought upon at first more by 
ignorance and apparent need than by avarice, though 
avarice follows fast — the father and mother do not 
easily perceive the difference for the child between 



io8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

factory labor and farm labor. It is true that the work 
of the factory — especially for the younger children 
— is often lighter than the work brought to the child 
upon the farm. But the benumbing power of factory 
labor lies not so much in its hardness as in its monot- 
ony. Picking up toothpicks from a pile, one by one, 
and depositing them in another, may be light work, 
but when continued for twelve hours a day it is a 
work to break the will and nerve of a strong man. 
The work of the factory means usually the doing of 
the same small task over and over again — moment 
in and moment out, hour after hour, day after day. 
Its reactive effect upon the mind is dulness, apathy, 
a mechanical and stolid spirit, without vivacity or 
hope. The labor of the farm is often hard, but it is 
full of the play and challenge of variety. It is labor 
in the open air. It is labor, not under the deadening 
and deafening clatter of machinery, but under the 
wide spaces of the sky, where sound comes up to 
you from free and living things, from things that 
may mean companionship, and where the silence — 
brooding — passes and repasses as a power of peace 
and healing. Upon the farm the child labors, as it 
labors in the home, under the eye of a guardianship 
which is usually that of the parent, which is full of 
a personal solicitude even if it be not full of intelli- 
gent affection. In the factory the child works as an 
industrial unit, a little member of an industrial aggre- 
gate, under an oversight which must, of necessity, be 
administrative rather than personal. Letting your 
own child work for you is a wholly different thing 
from letting another man work your child. 

And the evil has its quantitative side. The child 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 109 

is not alone. The child is a part of that vague and 
pathetic industrial force which the world calls, and 
ought to call, "child labor." No man would be per- 
mitted to operate his farm with that labor for ten 
days. A distinguished Southern expert has testified 
that 60 per cent of the operatives in the spinning 
departments of the cotton mills throughout the Pied- 
mont district were under sixteen years of age.^ The 
United States census for 1900 discloses the fact that 
of the total number of operatives in the cotton mills 
of Alabama nearly 30 per cent were under sixteen; 
and that in the Southern States as a whole the pro- 
portion of the cotton-mill operatives under sixteen 
years amounted to 25.1 per cent. What farmer, 
operating a large farm and employing large numbers 
of hands, would presume to conduct his farm upon 
the basis presented by such conditions .'' ^ 

Just how many of the workers of the mills are 
under fourteen years and just how many are under 
twelve it is difficult to say. The census of the 

1 See Report of the Testimony in the Hearing of April 29, 1902, 
before Subcommittee No. VII of the Committee on the Judiciary of 
the House of Representatives, on House Joint Resolution No. 20, p. 16. 

2 The gross number of cotton-mill operatives at the South under 
the age of sixteen was, in 1900, 24,459 out of a total of 97,559 opera- 
tives. See Twelfth Census of the U. S., Cotton Manufactures, Bulletin 
215. By the month of August, 1902, the number of establishments 
had doubled, and therefore, if the same proportion was maintained, 
the number under sixteen was approximately 50,000. Since the pas- 
sage of the child-labor laws of 1903, there has probably been a reduc- 
tion in the proportionate number of child operatives. The United 
States census places the line of the division between the child opera- 
tive and the adult operative at sixteen years. If some operatives under 
sixteen are a little old to be classed as " children," it is hardly less 
obvious that there are many over fifteen who are a little young to be 
classed as " adults." 



no THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

United States makes no distinction in the ages of 
those who are under sixteen. Only one Southern 
State • — North Carolina — makes any provision for 
the collection of the statistics of labor, and in North 
Carolina we are provided with the data for only those 
who are under fourteen. In the last available report 
for this State,^ i8 per cent of its textile operatives 
were under this age. As the conditions in North 
Carolina were probably not worse than in the South 
at large, the total under fourteen in the whole South 
was approximately 30,000 at the beginning of the 
year 1903. The number of children under the age 
of twelve in Southern factories — basing the estimate 
upon definite figures from certain representative locali- 
ties — was, at the beinning of 1903, about 20,000. The 
passage of the North Carolina child-labor law — in 
March, 1903 — has probably resulted in a marked 
reduction in the number of the younger children in 
that State. A similar reduction has probably taken 
place in other States, for in the year 1903 — in addi- 
tion to Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee, which 
had already acted — child-labor laws were passed for 
the first time, not only in North Carolina, but also in 
Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, and Texas. There 
is thus but one manufacturing State in the South which 
is now without such legislation. 

Even here, however, the legislature of Georgia 
has passed a bill visiting heavy penalties upon the 
able-bodied parent who is guilty of living in idle- 
ness while his younger children are at labor for 
his support. The demand for such a law and the 

' See p. 187 of the North Carolina Report of the Department of » 
Labor and Printing, 1901. 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR in 

passage of such a law are manifestly a confession 
that a child-labor law is needed. Even the less 
progressive mills naturally rallied with righteous unc- 
tion to the passage of any legislation which would 
seem to shift the responsibility for present conditions 
from the factories to the parents. Yet it is evident that, 
although the parents have been part offenders, the 
factories have been the principals. The parents have 
often been too ignorant to be responsive to higher 
industrial standards. The factories, however, are 
controlled and administered by men of intelligence 
and property. Neither ignorance nor poverty can 
be urged as an excuse for the persistent activity with 
which so many of their representatives have thronged 
the lobbies of Southern legislatures in the effort to 
defeat such an elementary law as the prohibiting of 
factory labor for children under twelve. By the 
advocates of protective legislation such an age limit 
was felt to be inadequate. But in view of the vigor 
and power of the opposition a twelve-year limit was 
regarded as the best obtainable result. Indeed it is 
cause for congratulation that such a measure of suc- 
cess should have been secured, and that within so 
short a period, in localities in which the problems 
presented by the factory were of such recent growth, 
eight States of the South should once for all have 
abandoned the old laissez-faire conception of indus- 
trial evils, and should have accepted, at least in its 
negative application, the principle of social responsi- 
bility in reference to the industrial status of the child. ^ 

1 While many of the younger children are being excluded from the 
mills by legislation, many more are being excluded and aided through 
jthe moral pressure created by the agitation for protective laws, 



112 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

In Georgia, legislation has been delayed, but a rapidly 
maturing public sentiment will soon secure the needed 
law. 

Here, as in the States which have already acted, 
there is occasion, however, for clear and insistent 
reply to the pleas by which some of the representa- 
tives of the factories are still attempting to lull the 
social conscience. Even where legislation has taken 
place, the old objections still arise, partly as a criti- 
cism of existing laws and partly as a protest against 
their full enforcement. 



Ill 

Still we hear the contention, sometimes upon the 
lips of well-meaning men, that legislation restricting 
the labor of the child is " paternalism," is usurpation 
of the functions of the parent. But the right of the 
parent is not the only truth of our democratic institu- 
tions ; these institutions rest also upon the right of 
the child. The right of the child to live is only a 
part of its right to be a child. The State which pre- 
vents a parent from killing a child by poison or from 
maiming a child by a blow, may also prevent a parent 
from killing or injuring the child by enforced and 
unnatural labor. The lighter duties of the home and 
the farm, duties which are half play, may often con- 
stitute no injury to children of tender years. And 
yet we must remember that among the most dis- 
tinctive of the rights of the little child is the divine 
right to do nothing. An abnormal tension upon 
muscles and nerves, in the period of immaturity, is 
an injury to all life, whether animal or human. To 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 113 

the human organism, with its greater delicacy, the 
peril is of course the greater. Immunity from such 
a burden is, for the young, a physical and natural 
right. All nature and all society are organized upon 
the basis of the recognition of this right. It is a 
right which is much more important to the home and 
to society than the right of the parent to shift the 
burdens of the breadwinner to the shoulders of his 
defenceless children. The State's protection of such 
a right involves, not the restriction, but the enlarge- 
ment of liberty. It means the extension rather than 
the negation of freedom, and its enforcement is not 
paternalism, but democracy. 

The democratic doctrine of the freedom of contract 
is a good doctrine. But no wise democrat will try to 
make this doctrine both iniquitous and absurd by 
giving it as an instrument of domestic constraint, 
into the hands of ignorant or idle or unscrupulous 
parents. As was declared long ago, by such an indi- 
vidualist as John Stuart Mill, " the doctrine of free- 
dom of contract in relation to the child can mean 
little more than freedom of coercion." 

The advocate of industrial liberty may well ask, 
How many of our younger children are clamoring for 
the "right" to labor in the mills.'' I know of one 
little girl whp, tempted by a few pennies, cried to go 
in. The next week she cried to come out. But 
those sturdy foes of " paternalism " who so loudly 
asserted her right to go in had nothing to say about 
her right to come out. The real befrienders of her 
liberty, and of liberty in the State, may well be 
chiefly concerned as to her right to come out. 

There is no essential conflict between the right of 
I 



114 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the parent and the right of the child, for the guarding 
of the child's liberty will, through the increase of its 
permanent efficiency, redound to the distinct advan- 
tage of the parent ; but if such a conflict of rights 
should arise, society must find its primary interest in 
the assertion of the right of the child to its child- 
hood — for the child constitutes both the heritage of 
the past and the promise of the future. 

The movement of a population from industrial 
dependence to industrial competence, from distress 
and poverty to comfort and property, is not a process 
of ease for any of its elements. Above all, the indus- 
trial readjustment of a population, moving from the 
conditions of agriculture to the conditions of manu- 
facture, must bear with severity upon every form and 
aspect of the family life. But this process, however 
painful, must be adjusted with the maximum of com- 
passion to the lives of the helpless and defenceless. 
The chief burden of this readjustment should not be 
laid upon the child. The life of the child should be, 
not the point of the severest pressure and the acutest 
suffering, but the point of chief protection. And yet 
I have knowledge, and every close observer of our 
factory conditions has knowledge, of dozens of grown 
men who pass their days and nights in idleness and 
dissipation, while they live upon the wages of their 
tender children. 

This is partly due to the inhumanity of the man. 
It is also due, however, to the indirect operation of 
the system of child labor. A well-known observer 
tells us that " a pathetic feature of the movement 
which is turning the mountaineer farmers into mill- 
hands is the fact that no regular employment is fur- 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 115 

nished to the men by the mills. The women and 
children all find places in the factories, but the men 
are left with nothing to do but to care for the little 
kitchen garden and carry the lunch pail to the family 
at the mill at noontime. The mills could employ 
them, but they seem content with their self-imposed 
tasks." ^ While the statement that "no regular em- 
ployment is furnished to the men by the mills " is not 
wholly true of the mills in many of the sections of 
the South, yet, as the statistics would indicate, the 
tendency to put the economic burden partly upon the 
defenceless members of the family naturally operates, 
among the ignorant, as a temptation to the father to 
shift that burden entirely to the woman and the chil- 
dren. 

This tendency represents a lowering of the stand- 
ard of parenthood which the State cannot well ignore. 
Aside from the direct benefits of legislation, the ex- 
pression of the interest of the State in the freedom 
and the welfare of the child must react upon the 
sentiment and practice of the family. Just as the 
concern of the State for the welfare of the child, 
expressed in the provisions for public education, has 
actually deepened the interest in private education, 
so the pressure of a higher ideal of solicitude, through 
a considerate measure looking to the relief of the con- 
ditions of child labor, must react upon the standard 
of parenthood, will lend a new and sweeter dignity to 
childhood in the homes of the ignorant, and will bring 
to the aid of the conscience of the father the whole- 
some forces of legal exaction and of social expecta- 

^ See an address by Frank Leake (1900) before the Manufacturers' 
Club of Philadelphia, Pa. (p. 14). 



ii6 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

tion. The humblest home will come to reflect that 
ideal of the value and promise of the child which has 
become articulate in the judgment of society. 

We may still expect to hear, at times, the reiterated 
claim that child labor is " necessary " to the family. 
It involves, however, so serious a confession that it is 
now expressed with much less confidence than of old. 
There will be fewer and fewer mills which will wish 
to admit, explicitly, that they in fact pay an adult 
wage so low as to force the economic burden of the 
family upon the frailest and the youngest. It does 
not sound well, and it is not true. 

A well-known expert has declared that he has had 
direct knowledge of numbers of mills " making prof- 
its of 35 to 40 per cent, and some close to 100 per 
cent, per annum on the capital invested." ^ Making 
every allowance for any possible element of exaggera- 
tion, can so profitable an industry for one moment 
present the plea that it must fix its adult wage at 
so low a point as to force the family, in the mere 
struggle for existence, to throw the burdens of em- 
ployment upon its children under twelve .-' Is such 
an enterprise the instrument of our industrial awaken- 

1 Address by Mr. Frank Leake (1900) before the Manufacturers' 
Club of Philadelphia, p. 15. The year to which Mr. Leake refers was 
one of exceptional prosperity, and later years would not show so large 
a margin of profit, — but the rapid and continuous development of 
cotton mills at the South is ample evidence that the business is not a 
"failing venture," and that if there exists among the operatives an 
economic necessity for the labor of little children, the responsibility for 
that need rests squarely upon the mills. The profits of the mills, the 
profits of any legitimate industry in America, easily justify an adult 
wage which — under any normal conditions — will relieve the younger 
children of the family from the burdens of sustained and confining 
labor. 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 117 

ing ? Our factories cannot long oppose the protec- 
tion of our children upon the ground that the chil- 
dren, and that the very standards of our industrial 
life, are in need of protection from the factories. 

There has been little plea that the mills have been 
seriously dependent upon the younger children. 
Certain factories have looked upon their employment 
as an advantage, but by the greater number of ex- 
perienced operators their labor has been regarded as 
peculiarly unreliable and expensive. Yet the mills, 
as a whole, have clung to the younger children as 
long as it was possible to do so, partly for the purpose 
of training the child for the work, and partly for 
the purpose of '•' holding the family." Both these 
arguments seem to be gradually yielding, however, 
to the argument for conservative legislation. It is 
true that the child's fingers gain a certain added 
dexterity from early work ; but this advantage at 
one end is more than offset by the dulling effect of 
exacting labor upon the immature; by the increase, 
at the other end, of premature senility and the con- 
sequent shortening, not only of productive capacity, 
but sometimes of life itself. Even where Hfe lasts 
on — and there are observers who claim that child 
labor has no effect upon the mere period of expec- 
tation — the victim of the child-labor system is early 
counted among the relatively incapable. 

I say the "relatively incapable," because, while he 
may continue to do the labor of the child, he usually 
fails to advance very far into the activities of the 
man. There are exceptions to this rule. But the 
canons of social security cannot be based upon ex- 
ceptions. The abnormal strain of premature labor 



ii8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, 

induces premature development, and, as a rule, pre- 
mature development results in arrested development. 
To the industry itself, dependent in all its higher 
and more profitable forms upon the skill and effi- 
ciency of its operative class, there is neither wisdom 
nor security in a policy which contributes to such 
conditions. 

Nor will it serve, as an objection to a child-labor 
law, to maintain that the mill must grant employ- 
ment to the younger children in order to hold the 
family. Incredible as it may seem, the demand for 
the using of the children has come in many instances 
from the mills rather than from the parents. But 
there have also been cases in which the "good mill" 
has been placed under pressure from the parents, 
the parents threatening to go to other mills unless 
their younger children were admitted to labor. Such 
an instance, however, instead of proving an objection 
to a law excluding the younger children from em- 
ployment, is in itself an argument for the enactment 
of the law. The passage of the law has a tendency 
to put every mill under the same economic standard, 
makes futile and impossible the threat of the parents 
to go to other mills (inasmuch as the "other mills" 
would also be subject to the law), and upholds the 
juster regulations and the more wholesome condi- 
tions of the progressive factory. 

One of the most serious phases of the Southern 
factory system, especially as that system touches the 
life and fate of the child, lies in the habit of " long 
hours." I have known mills in which for ten and 
twelve days at a time the factory hands — children 
and all — were called to work before sunrise and 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 119 

were dismissed from work only after sunset, labor- 
ing from dark to dark. I have repeatedly seen 
them at labor for twelve, thirteen, and even fourteen 
hours per day. In the period of the holidays or at 
other " rush times " I have seen children of eight and 
nine years of age leaving the factory as late as 9.30 
o'clock at night, and finding their way with their own 
little lanterns, through the unlighted streets of the 
mill village, to their squalid homes. It was for the 
correction of the evil of night work quite as much 
as for the establishment of an age limit that Southern 
sentiment has recently been aroused. 

In Alabama the campaign for a child-labor law 
was organized under the leadership of a voluntary 
State committee, including within its personnel rep- 
resentatives of the Church, the press, the judiciary, 
the labor unions, and the mercantile and banking 
interests of the State. The effort for the passage 
of a child-labor law was defeated before the legisla- 
ture of 1900, largely through the skilful and aggres- 
sive opposition of the representative of one of the 
New England factories in Alabama.^ The defeat of 
the bill served, however, only to increase the activity 
of its advocates.^ The organization of the committee 

^ A correspondence in reference to the partial responsibility of New 
England for the opposition to child-labor laws at the South will be 
found in the Appendix (B) to this volume, p. 309. 

- Explicit acknowledgment should be made of the work performed 
at this time by the special agent of the American Federation of Labor, 
Irene Ashby Macfadyen. Mrs. Macfadyen (then Miss Ashby) was 
subjected — as an outsider and as a "labor representative" — to some 
criticism, but her single-hearted devotion to her cause was supreme ; 
and while she left the State in 1901, her al:)le and conscientious work 
contributed in no small degree to the ultimate success of the bill. 



I20 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

was Strengthened and enlarged. An aggressive effort 
was made to create a literature of the subject, a 
literature which might be available not only in Ala- 
bama but throughout the South, a number of pam- 
phlets were prepared upon the several phases of the 
argument, and nearly thirty thousand copies were 
freely circulated. The press of the South, almost 
without exception, responded to the emergency. The 
women's clubs, the Christian clergy, the labor unions, 
and the representatives of a few of the mills, united 
with earnest men and women of almost every class 
in the demand for a conservative measure of legisla- 
tion. When the legislature of 1903 assembled at 
Montgomery, the manufacturers met at the capital, 
appointed a committee to represent them, and agreed, 
through their committee, to enter into a discussion 
of terms. The method of personal conference was 
at once accepted in the hope that a bill might be 
decided upon which would command — before the 
legislature — the support of all the parties in interest. 
A bill was agreed upon, signed by the representatives 
of both sides, and passed by the General Assembly. 
It did not satisfy either of the contestants, but the 
advocates of legislation accepted it as the best meas- 
ure then obtainable. It prohibits child labor in fac- 
tories ^ — -save under a few exceptional conditions — 
to children under twelve, prohibits any night work 
for those under thirteen, limits the night work of 
those under sixteen to forty-eight hours per week, 
provides for the registration of the names and ages 
of all minors in employment, and affixes penalties 
upon the parents for false registration of ages, and 
upon employers for violations of the law. It is to 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 121 

be noted that it totally prohibits night work only for 
those under thirteen and that the law provides no 
special system of inspection. Upon these phases 
of the bill the Chairman of the Child-labor Com- 
mittee expressed himself as follows: — 

" The Alabama bill was a compromise. For ex- 
ample, the original measure totally prohibited night 
work for all the children under sixteen years of age. 
The representatives of the manufacturers, in the con- 
ference between the committee of the manufacturers 
and the representatives of the Child-labor Committee, 
refused to accept this provision, and even declined to 
allow the prohibition of night work for children as 
young as fourteen. They insisted that the limit 
should be put down to thirteen years. I think that 
the insistence of the manufacturers upon this point 
clearly indicates that there is a fallacy somewhere in 
the claim that our manufacturers have been exclu- 
sively the representatives of the tenderest philan- 
thropy. 

" Many of our factories are opposed to night work. 
Many of the strongest men among the manufac- 
turers have never worked a little child after six or 
seven o'clock at night. One must confess, however, 
to a certain amount of disappointment that the 
strongest and best men should so far yield to the 
influence of the men representing lower standards 
that a committee representing the manufacturing 
interests of the whole State should demand as an 
inexorable condition of legislation that the proposed 
law should permit the continuation of night work for 
children of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years. 

" As to the plans for the future, and as to whether 



122 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

or not we will ask for a system of state inspection, 
these things depend upon the course of the mill men. 
A committee of gentlemen, formally appointed to 
represent the factories, have agreed in writing to the 
terms of the law. I shall not assume that they are 
going to go back on the word which they have thus 
solemnly given, given not to me especially or to 
our committee, but to the whole people of the State. 
I shall assume that the law will be obeyed until I 
learn that it is violated." ^ 

In Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina there 
are partial — though inadequate — provisions for in- 
spection. As the evidences of non-compliance arise 
and are accumulated, the system of State inspection 
will be introduced throughout the South where it 
does not exist, and will be strengthened where it 
does exist, — for the people of the Southern States, 
whatever their limitations, are not given over to indif- 
ference or to commercialism. The very name of 
" reform," under the exploitations of the reconstruc- 
tion period, was made odious to them. They have 
not been familiar with the social problems presented 
by manufacturing enterprises, and they have been 
without legislative precedents for the correction of 
industrial wrongs ; but the South has been aroused 
upon this issue, and the people of the Southern States 
— if they are in earnest about anything — are to-day 
in earnest about the liberties and the opportunities of 
the child. 

The South cannot and will not provide millions of 
revenue at one end of her social system in order to 
give her children schools, and permit any industry, 

1 See the issue of Charities, New York, May 2, 1903, pp. 454, 455. 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 123 

however important, to stand at the other end of that 
system and shut up her children in the factory. 
Those who have contended for industrial reforms 
have conceived these reforms as an integral element 
of educational progress, and they have conceived 
both these aspects of advancement, the movement 
for industrial liberty and the movement for the 
"schools of the people," as but two phases of the 
one underlying, essential direction of Southern life, 
the movement toward a truly democratic order. 

The system of child labor, especially at the South, 
is at war, not only with the welfare of the child, 
the parent, the industry, but with democracy itself. 
It stands, not only for arrested development in the 
individual, for ignorance and industrial helplessness, 
but for arrested development in the social class to 
which the child belongs. These have been the white 
non-participants of the older civilization. The greater 
number of them, as indicated in the opening chapter 
of this volume, are now being incorporated within 
the general body of democratic life. They are be- 
coming conscious participants in the fulness and free- 
dom of their century. Those who have become 
involved in the industrial movement represented 
by the mill might well find through the mill, — as a 
few have done, • — not only more to eat and more to 
wear, but more to live for. The mill might well be 
to all, as it has been to some, the instrument of their 
transplanting, — out of a life of barren and isolated 
non-participation into a Hfe of fruitful and generous 
relationship with men, with work, with the rewarding 
world. But it has too often seemed to be the policy of 
the factory to save only in order that it might consume. 



124 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

The isolated family is called in from the barren 
lands about its rural cabin, but too often it is re- 
deemed from isolation only that its helplessness may 
bring profit to the instrument of its redemption. It 
is put to dwell within the factory enclosure ; its in- 
stinctive desire to live somewhat to itself, to own a 
little land, to have a home, is denied ; it must be " the 
company's" tenant, it must — usually — trade at "the 
company's store," its children are to go upon "the com- 
pany's roll." The child is trained almost from infancy 
into a certain human and economic dependence upon 
one particular industry. If it have a few months, 
now and then, for schooling, it must go to "the com- 
pany's school." If the family go to worship, there 
is at the larger mills " the company's church," a 
chapel in which the salary of the minister and his 
helpers is defrayed by the same resourceful and gen- 
erous " company " — the company, by the way, which 
has charged that the enactment of a child-labor law 
would be paternalism ! 

Here and there the exceptional child, through an 
exceptional virility, rises out of the enfolding powers 
of the system ; here and there a life escapes. But 
as a rule the system is effective ; and the familiar 
saying, " once an operative, always an operative," 
rings all too seriously true. The operatives remain 
a fixed and semi-dependent class. One manufacturer 
bluntly informed me that he wished them to remain 
so, upon the double ground that they would then 
" never organize and would never want or get high 
wages." "My business," said he, "is a low-wages 
business." I will not charge that his temper is repre- 
sentative Many of the manufacturers honestly and 



IV THE INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL AND CHILD LABOR 125 

earnestly desire the progress of their people. But 
the fact remains that the factory system, as a system, 
betrays a tendency to hold its humbler industrial 
forces in a state of arrested development ; which, 
from the broader social standpoint and in relation 
to the larger life of democracy, means an arrested 
participation. Here is an eddy in the fuller and 
freer current of democratic life ; here, in the indus- 
trial imprisonment of the child, is a contradiction — 
however temporary — of those juster and deeper 
forces which are claiming the human possibilities 
of the individual — however lowly — as elements in 
the power and happiness of the State. 



CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL 
SOUTH 



CHAPTER V 

CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH ^ 

Our subject brings to us a national question. And 
yet I must begin what I shall try to say to you this 
evening with a disclaimer and an explanation. As 
my disclaimer, I would say that I use the word 
" national " in no political or federal sense. The con- 
ditions of industry vary so greatly and so decisively 
from State to State and from locality to locality that 
the enactment of a federal child-labor law, applicable 
to all conditions and under all circumstances, would 
be inadequate if not unfortunate. 

As my explanation, I would say that I use the 
word "national" in that geographical sense in which 
we must all say, and with all emphasis, that the prob- 
lem of child labor is a national problem. North and 
South, it belongs to all of us. If the proportionate 
number of child workers is greatest at the South, the 
actual number of child workers, in the year 1900, was 
greater in the one State of Pennsylvania than in all 
of the States of the South together. Wherever we 
find the factory and the child, we find the working of 
those economic and human forces which draw the 

^ An address delivered before the National Conference of Charities 
and Correction, at Atlanta, Ga., May 9, 1903. Reported stenograph- 
ically, and revised for publication. 

K 129 



I30 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

child into the processes of industrial production. 
The factory, like every instrumentality of progress, 
brings its blessings and its evils. Let us recognize 
its blessings. Let us yield to those blessings, potent 
and far-reaching as they are, an intelligent and 
generous measure of appreciation and applause. 
But let us also have an intelligent perception of the 
evils of the factory, and let us resolutely bring to 
those evils — in the name of our children, our 
country, and our industries — such remedies as we 
may be able to secure. 

While it may be somewhat depressing for us to 
reahze that the industrial development of our country 
bears its curse, it is inspiring to remember that the 
realization of this curse has revealed the essential 
soundness of the national heart. If child labor is a 
general evil, the general recognition of this evil has 
brought — in the recent successive victories of child- 
labor legislation — the most conspicuous evidence 
of the inherent right-mindedness of American life 
with which I am familiar. In Texas, in Alabama, in 
South Carolina, in North Carolina, in Virginia, Il- 
linois, New Hampshire, New York, — in State after 
State, in locality after locality, — 'the common con- 
science of the land has pierced the sophistries by 
which men would bind the children to the drudgery 
of factory and mine, and has written its solicitude and 
its compassions in the terms of law.^ 

Much of this legislation has been inadequate. In 

^ See an admirable summary of the child-labor legislation of the 
United States in the Hand Book for 1904, compiled by Madeleine W. 
Sykes and Josephine Goldmark ; National Consumers' League, 105 
East Twenty-second Street, New York City. See also Report of the 
U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1902, Vol. H, p. 2347. 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 131 

some States it has represented the effort to reaffirm 
and to reenforce the intention of older statutes ; in 
other States it has represented the first explicit recogni- 
tion of the State's responsibility toward the more 
defenceless elements of an industrial society, toward 
the potential citizenship of the industrial child. In 
all cases, however, — whether in response to the 
demand for law enactment or for law enforcement, — 
the heart of our country. North and South, has shown 
itself to be a sound heart, and the soul of the Republic 
has kept watch above its children. When we contrast 
the recent victories of child-labor legislation, victories 
so speedily secured, with the long struggle of the 
heroic Shaftesbury, we gather an evidence, a signal 
and gracious evidence, of one of the ennobling dis- 
tinctions between his generation and our own. 

In speaking to you this evening, I wish, however, 
to deal as concretely and as definitely as I can with 
certain phases of the struggle for legislation in our 
Southern States. I have consented to do so, not be- 
cause I would ignore the evils of the North or would 
exaggerate the difficulties of the South, but because an 
account of the controversial experience of one section 
in relation to a great and vital industrial issue may 
be of some possible value to the experience of other 
sections. 

At a very early period in the history of our move- 
ment for legislation, our proposal of a child-labor law 
was met by a counter proposal. There were manu- 
facturers who admitted the existence of evils, who 
lamented the prevalence of conditions which they 
protested that they were anxious to rectify, but who 
assured us that the real remedy was not the prohibi- 



132 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



tion of child labor, but the enforcement of compulsory 
education. The suggestion possessed an engaging 
plausibility. And yet I confess that I believe it to be 
well to survey with a watchful interest and a some- 
what exacting analysis the remedies offered by those 
who have permitted, and who may have profited by, 
the very evils to be remedied. Under such condi- 
tions, the counter proposal is sometimes only the 
most deceptive element in a neat and effective 
machinery of estoppel. This impression was not 
abated by an examination of the terms in which the 
proposal was conveyed. One of the most aggressive 
of its advocates was a representative of New England 
who has been largely interested in cotton-mill prop- 
erties at the South. ^ In the columns of the Evening 
Transcript of Boston he declared that the thing for 
Alabama to do was simply to follow the example of 
Massachusetts, pass a law for compulsory education, 
and, presto, the problem would be solved. We found, 
however, that the physician was not ready for his 
remedy. He was careful to add that any compulsory 
education law which might be passed in Alabama 
should " of course " not become operative till after 
the passage of similar laws in the States of North 
CaroHna, South CaroHna, and Georgia. This enthusi- 
asm for reform, only on condition that all the rest 
of the world will reform too, is somewhat famihar to 
the students of the history of economic progress. 

I do not quite know why the representative of 

Massachusetts investments at the South should have 

opposed a child-labor law, why he should have felt 

compelled to reject one method of reform because 

1 See Appendix B, p. 320, 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 133 

Alabama would not accept another; but men have been 
known to attempt the blocking of a reform which is 
clearly possible by the safe and vigorous proposal of 
a reform which is impossible. That a child-labor law 
was practicable, and that under our local conditions a 
compulsory education law was impracticable and im- 
possible, was evident to the vast majority of the 
friends of progress in Alabama. 

The counter proposal was as inadequate as it was 
impracticable. What would compulsory education 
mean in our Southern States .■' Would such a provi- 
sion mean at the South what a similar measure would 
mean in the States of the North ? It has been so 
assumed, and as the proposal has been urged upon 
us, our Northern friends have naturally made their 
mental pictures, pictures constructed from the mate- 
rials of their local experience, in which they have 
seen the children freed from the mills by the simple 
operation of a nine months' compulsory attendance 
upon the schools. But at the time when that sugges- 
tion — with such commendable fervor — was urged 
upon the friends of protective legislation, the public 
school term of the Carolinas was but seventy-six days 
and the public school term of Alabama was but 
seventy-eight days. Those terms are somewhat longer 
now. And yet you can easily see that with so inade- 
quate a school term this counter proposal of compul- 
sory education could hardly have been regarded as a 
counter remedy. Even if adopted, it would have left 
the children of our humbler classes, for the greater 
part of the year, entirely available for the factories. 
The programme made possible by this counter proposal 
could have been expressed within a sentence, — " For 



134 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the little children of the poor, three months in the 
school, nine months in the mill." 

Whatever the advantages of a policy of compulsory 
education, I think you will at once agree with me 
that such a measure could be no adequate substitute 
for a child-labor law. It is obviously true that we 
cannot reach a comprehensive bettering of conditions 
by the mere enactment of an age limit for employ- 
ment, nor by any of the expedients of a purely nega- 
tive and corrective legislation. All this we have not 
failed to realize. But we have thought it best to do 
for the children of the factories the one best possible 
thing now obtainable in our Southern States ; for if 
we cannot yet secure for every child a fixed attend- 
ance upon the school, we can at least secure for the 
younger children that industrial freedom which will 
afford them the possibility of the school. If we can- 
not compel them to be educated, we can at least 
permit them to be educated. And how men who 
claim to be in favor of compulsory education can at 
the same time oppose the prohibition of child labor is 
somewhat difficult for the uninstructed intelligence to 
understand, — inasmuch as the present factory system 
of our country with its low wages and its long hours 
obviously represents, as it touches the lives of the 
children, a system of compulsory ignorance. 

The movement for the prohibition of the labor in 
factories of our children under twelve has also been 
opposed by what I have regarded as a mistaken com- 
mercial prejudice. A few representatives of our 
"business interests," under the leadership of some of 
the narrower trade journals of the South, have dis- 
puted the wisdom of protective legislation. Such 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 135 

opposition was inevitable. It has made plausible 
appeals to familiar forces. " Business " is everywhere 
a word of mighty omen. It is altogether natural that 
it should be so. At the South, especially, we have 
come to look with peculiar appreciation upon those 
practical and material forces which have wrought 
the rehabilitation of the land. After the desolation 
of war, and after the more bitter desolation of the 
period which followed war, it is inevitable that the 
question of bread-winning should have become with 
many of our people a question of absorbing and 
paramount importance. "Prosperity," commercial 
and industrial "prosperity," has been a name of 
mystic and constraining force. To invite " pros- 
perity " has been a form of patriotism. To alienate 
" prosperity " has seemed almost like apostasy. 

When, therefore, we offered the proposals of 
protective legislation for the children, we were met 
with protests. We were greeted with indignant 
questions : " Do you not see that this legislation 
will touch the cotton factories } " — " Do you not 
know that the cotton factories are the agents of 
prosperity .-' " — " Do you want to compromise or to 
arrest the prosperity of the South ? " — " Do you not 
know that this child-labor law is an attack upon busi- 
ness .'' " It was thus that we were questioned ; and yet 
such questions, I submit to you, were in themselves 
as gross and as insidious an insult as was ever offered 
to the " business " and the " prosperity " of our 
Southern States. For what do they imply ? They 
imply, if they mean anything whatever, that there is 
some inherent and essential connection between the 
prosperity of the South and the labor of little children 



136 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

under twelve years of age. They imply that the busi- 
ness success of the South is in some way involved in 
the right to throw the burdens of employment upon 
the immature. They carry the suggestion that our 
material progress is dependent upon unwholesome 
economic and humanitarian conditions, and that the 
development of the South is possibly contingent upon 
the prolonged, enforced, and unnatural labor of the 
defenceless and the helpless. I resent that imputa- 
tion. I resent that suggestion not only in the name 
of the South at large but in the name of the business 
interests and the conservative commercial forces of 
our Southern States ; and I contend that from these 
laws to protect our children under twelve no damage 
can result to our business interests, — no damage 
comparable to the damage which would result from 
the general acceptance of the impression that child 
labor is the basis of our success, and that with the 
restriction of child labor there would follow a restric- 
tion of our industrial development. I solemnly declare 
that the forces which are injuring the prosperity and 
compromising the industrial repute of the South are 
the agencies, political or journalistic, which have 
tended to give currency to that assumption, and 
which, by their opposition to protective legislation 
for the younger children, have made our progress 
synonymous, in many minds, with the baser methods 
and the retrogressive policies of production. These 
are the agencies which, despite their lavish zeal, are 
injuring the standing of Southern investments and 
Southern properties. And I as solemnly declare that 
the men who are to-day befriending the industrial 
South are the men, men in commerce, in the trades, 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 137 

in the professions, men of every phase of contem- 
porary Southern experience, who in eight States of the 
South have rejected this leadership, have welcomed 
the prohibition of the labor of the younger children, 
have resolved to free their properties from any occa- 
sion for prejudicial discussion and oblique advertise- 
ment, and have given notice to the world that the 
prosperity of the South is based, not on the labor of 
the immature, but on the fertility of her fields, the 
advantages of her climate, her cotton, her ores, her 
forests, her waters, and — above all — upon the char- 
acter and the capacities of her manhood. 

We have also been met by the manifestation of 
what I must not hesitate to call a false humanitarian 
prejudice. We have been assured that "these chil- 
dren are much better off in the mills than they were 
out of the mills." And indeed I confess it to be 
somewhat hard to deal with the arguments of those 
who end by defending as a benefit what they have 
begun by denying as an evil. We were first assured 
that there were practically no httle children in the 
mills. The reports of the Twelfth Census of the 
United States^ show that in the States outside 
the South the relative number of the cotton-mill 
employees under sixteen years of age had, in twenty 
years, been reduced from 15.6 per cent to 'J.'j per 
cent ; but that in the cotton mills of the South, dur- 
ing this period from 1880 to 1900, the relative num- 
ber of the operatives under sixteen years of age had 
remained at approximately 25 per cent. Yet we 
were assured that few of these were under twelve. 
Just how many, as a matter of fact, were under 
^ See Bulletin No. 215, on Cotton Manufactures. 



138 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

twelve, no man can accurately say. We began our 
movement for reforms with every effort to secure the 
definite data of exact conditions. Weeks were spent 
in laborious investigation, only to find that the evi- 
dence was contradicted as rapidly as it was collected. 
The most notorious facts were subjected to solemn 
and peremptory denial. We soon found that our 
best recourse in debate, a recourse abundantly con- 
vincing, was simply to assume what our opponents 
were on every hand compelled, conspicuously, to 
admit. On one day we might find the representatives 
of the factories declaring that the mills contained 
practically no children under twelve ; but on the next 
day we found them thronging the lobby of the legis- 
lature to prevent the passage of a law which might 
take those under twelve out of the factories. " Why," 
we asked, "do you oppose a law prohibiting some- 
thing which nobody wishes to do; why object to 
the abridgment of a liberty which nobody wishes 
to exercise ? " Under such persuasions it was hard to 
believe that there were no factories employing, or 
desiring the employment of, many of the younger 
children. And yet these protestations have become 
an interesting evidence of sensitiveness. It is inter- 
esting to discover that the employment of the younger 
children, the children for whom legislation had been 
invoked, was thus denied, emphatically, as an evil. 

Yet strangely enough we straightway find that their 
employment is admitted and defended as a benefit. 
We are told that " these children are much better off 
in the mills than they were in the places where they 
came from." I question whether it is ever fair to 
estimate our duty to the child by the disadvantages 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 139 

of its past. But is the contention true ? Is the labor 
of the mills a philanthropic provision for the children 
under twelve ? To hear some of our opponents dwell 
upon the mill as a philanthropy, you would suppose 
the average child could find in the average cotton 
mill a comprehensive educational equipment — a sort 
of institutional civilizer : — kindergarten, grammar 
school, high school, university, — and a trip to 
Europe, all in one. Do not believe one word of it ! 
It is true, in some instances, that the general condi- 
tion of the child at the mills is better and happier 
than the condition of the same child before coming 
to the mills. I say, "in some instances," because in 
many cases the child is less fortunate than before. 
But, in the cases in which the change is a change to 
better things, is the bettering of the fortune of the 
child the result of child labor, or the result of the 
general bettering of the condition of the family .-• 
Let us be clear about this. 

It is true that the outward lot of the child of the 
mill family is sometimes better than that of the poor 
white child of the country. But where this is true, 
it is true not because of child labor, but in spite of it. 
There are men at the East who claim that the condi- 
tion of the child in the sweat-shop is a " vast improve- 
ment " on the condition of the child in the crowded 
foreign city where it once lived. Does that prove 
that the sweat-shop labor of its tiny hands is respon- 
sible for the change .-* No. Is child labor responsible 
for the better condition of the factory child .'' Its life 
may share in the general improvement of conditions, 
but the child, instead of receiving, as childhood 
should, the maximum of immunity from distress, and 



I40 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the largest freedom which the new environment 
affords, is bearing in its tender strength the greatest 
burden and the heaviest curse of the new prosperity. 
Let us not be guilty of mental confusion. Let us not 
credit the good fortune of the family to the misfortune 
of the child. 

The cotton mills, indeed our factories of every sort, 
are bringing their blessings to the South. They are 
touching with inspiring and creative power the fate 
of some of the poorer people of our isolated locali- 
ties, are enabling them to shift the industrial basis of 
their lives from the conditions of agriculture, in which 
they may have failed, to the conditions of manufac- 
ture, in which I trust they will at length succeed. 
Let us grant, not reluctantly but gladly, the possible 
blessings of the factory. But let us stick, resolutely 
and persistently, to the question now at issue. That 
question is not the economic and social advantage of 
the factory. Upon that we may be all agreed. The 
question now at issue is not the question as to whether 
the factory is an advantage, but the question as to 
whether the advantages and the blessings of the fac- 
tory, to the community or to the child, are based upon 
the labor of our children under twelve. That is our 
question. 

I yield all legitimate credit to our factories. I 
yield instant and explicit tribute to those men among 
us — no matter how greatly they may differ from me 
upon the question of child labor — who have given of 
their abilities and their fortunes to the upbuilding of 
the industrial South. But I protest that the economic 
and social advantage of the factory has nothing what- 
ever to do with this question in debate, and I further 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 141 

protest that when these questions are confused, when 
men assume that the advantages of the factory to the 
community and to the child are based upon the mo- 
notonous and confining labor of our younger children, 
they are wronging not merely the community and 
the children but our factories as well. 

In the course of this discussion at the South, there 
has also been much appeal to the interests of an 
undiscriminating industrial policy. There is much 
prejudice against labor unionism. The South, upon 
economic and social issues, is intensely and overwhelm- 
ingly conservative. Because, therefore, the child-labor 
bills have had the sympathy of the labor unions, there 
have been men who have attacked them as labor 
measures. They have opposed a child-labor law be- 
cause the labor unions have approved it. Such men, 
if they followed the logic of their argument, would go 
back on the Ten Commandments if the labor unions 
should make a declaration of sympathy with the Deca- 
logue. Now, I hold no brief for the labor unions. 
I am free to say, however, that when the capitalist 
opposes protective legislation for our children on the 
ground that the labor union has approved it, he in- 
jures the interests of capital far more than he injures 
the interests of the union. I can tell our friend the 
capitalist — and he is my friend — that just now the 
most striking and the most general encouragement of 
labor unionism in this section of our country is the 
fact that upon the one most vital, most practical, 
most popular industrial issue before the South to-day 
labor unionism has got upon the right side, and 
" capital " has too often been upon the wrong side. 
Strictly from the selfish standpoint of the capitalistic 



142 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

interest, what is the inevitable result of the joining of 
such an issue ? That result might easily have been 
predicted. The popular sympathy, the public opinion 
of the South, has been drawn as never before to the 
side of labor unionism, and it has come to question, as 
never before, some of the too familiar methods and 
policies of organized capital. In a conflict between 
the organized forces of labor and the organized forces 
of the employers, it is absolutely inevitable, as the 
whole history of civilization might have informed us, 
that the great common, fundamental instincts of 
humanity were bound to go to the side which has 
represented the need and the appeal of the defence- 
less. I am glad to say that thousands of the business 
men of the South have recognized this fact, have 
recognized it not only in justice to themselves but in 
justice to our children of the mills, and have labored 
in season and out of season for wise and righteous 
measures of reform. 

These are the men who have represented the wiser 
and higher conscience of our industrial development. 
For we touch at this point certain profounder issues 
in the industrial policy of the South than the mere 
issue between unionism and capitalism. One is an 
issue which touches the ethical assumptions, the 
moral standards of our economic progress ; the other 
touches the old, old issue between sagacity and 
stupidity, between wisdom and folly, between justice 
and selfishness, as we deal with the human factors 
of industrial greatness. 

The South has one great characteristic natural 
product — her cotton. In its possession she is with- 
out a rival. Her monopoly may be challenged, but 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 143 

her preeminence will remain. Upon the basis of 
this great and characteristic natural product we are 
creating a great, characteristic, and commanding indus- 
try — cotton manufacture. Its successes and its vic- 
tories are as inevitable as they are desirable. It can 
have no enemies unless we constitute ourselves its 
enemies. It can have no perils unless we ourselves 
found it in embarrassment and league it with disas- 
ter. Its growth, its triumphs, its opportunities, its 
rewards, its infamy or its glory are a part of the dis- 
tinctive heritage of our children and of our children's 
children. What is the basis of this industry ? What 
shall be its economic and moral character .'' How are 
we settling it and founding it ? This is the issue, the 
intimate and inclusive issue, of this question of child 
labor at the South. I am interested, therefore, in 
the question of child labor, not merely for the sake 
of our children of the mills, not merely because I 
have seen and photographed children of six and 
seven years who were at labor in our factories for 
twelve and thirteen hours a day, not merely because 
I have seen them with their little fingers mangled by 
machinery and their little bodies numb and listless 
with exhaustion, but because I am not willing that 
our whole economic progress should be involved in 
such conditions ; and because as a Southern man, 
born, reared, and educated in the South, I am 
resolved to take my part, however humbly, in the 
settling of the industrial character of this our great- 
est industry. Because I belong to the South and 
because I love the South, I do not want its most 
important and distinctive industry to stand under any 
sort of odium, moral or economic. I believe that an 



144 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

intelligent moral interest in the conditions of the fac- 
tory, and the jealous guarding of its ethical assump- 
tions, will minister not merely to the humanity of its 
standards and the happiness of its operatives, but 
to the dignity, currency, and value of its properties. 
In the interest of its success as well as in the 
interest of its renown, I wish its repute to be as 
fair as the white fields of our cotton. Command- 
ing the economic and moral confidence of the in- 
vestors in our securities, of the spectators of our 
progress, of the enlightened and approving opinion 
of mankind, I wish this industry to take its place 
among us as one of the noblest as well as one of 
the greatest of the productive forces of our century 
and our civilization. 

We must, moreover, settle once for all the indus- 
trial policy of the South as that policy touches the 
human factors of industrial greatness. In thinking 
so much about sociology, let us not forget to think 
a little about childhood, — nor about childhood only, 
but also about the children. The two things are not 
synonymous. Such are the academic hypocrisies of 
humanity that the "age of chivalry," the age which 
talked so nobly and so inordinately of womanhood, 
did comparatively little for its women. And our 
age, which talks very beautifully of childhood and 
the child, is finding in its entrancing preoccupations 
much opportunity to neglect its children. 

To this neglect the South cannot and — I thank 
God — will not yield. If the cotton, the crude mate- 
rial of our industries, is peculiarly the South's, so 
the human factors of our industry are also ours. 
The children of our Northern mills — as Miss 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 145 

Addams ^ could inform you — are largely the chil- 
dren of the foreigner. If the Northern States can 
legislate to protect the children of the foreigner, 
surely we can legislate to protect the children of the 
South. I speak not in jealousy of the foreigner — 
God forbid! — ^but I dare not speak in forgetfulness 
of our own, of the children of these humbler people 
of our Southern soil — a people native to our section 
and our interests ; of our own race and blood, slowly 
preparing for their share in the advancing largeness 
of our life, and worthy through their children of 
to-day to constitute an ever increasing factor in the 
broader and happier citizenship of our future years. 

They are called a " poor " white people ; but from 
that knowledge of them which has come through a 
long experience of affectionate and familiar contact, 
I can say that their poverty is not the essential pov- 
erty of inward resources, but rather the temporary 
and incidental poverty of unfortunate conditions. 
They are rich in capacities and aptitudes. The ex- 
ploitation of their children, though their own igno- 
rance may sometimes make them a party to its 
processes, is a crime not only against the rights of 
the defenceless, but a crime against the economic 
progress and the industrial future of the South. 
Why, the man upon the farm does not put the bur- 
den of sustained employment upon the immature 
among his cattle. Shall we be less solicitous of our 
children .-' If cotton manufacture is to continue to 
thrive at the South, it can do so only upon the basis 
of the intelligence and efficiency of its operatives. 

^ The preceding speaker, Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, 
Chicago. 



146 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

Ignorance and helplessness may make the profits of 
an hour, but the increasing and abiding wealth of 
a great industry lies only in the hands of knowledge, 
capacity, and skill. Sustained labor in the factory 
has always tended to arrest the mental and physical 
development of the child, and so to lower the pro- 
ductive power of the operative. An industrial State 
which throws the burdens of employment upon its 
children of tender years burns its candle at both 
ends. The South makes comparatively small gains 
from immigration. The sacrifice of the childhood of 
our poorer people, the exhaustion of their best skill 
and of their fullest vigor and intelligence means 
nothing less than the exploitation of our one indige- 
nous industrial population, the real hope of the tex- 
tile future of our Southern States. 

The potential industrial and moral wealth repre- 
sented by the child belongs, moreover, not to the 
eager avarice of a single industry, but to the growing 
body of social opportunities and needs. Society has 
need of the children, for it has need of the fullest 
womanhood and manhood. Its right to protect the 
child is based upon this need as well as upon the 
need of the child. A human life is a continuous 
and expanding asset of social promise and fulfilment. 
Stooping over the tiny spring, a single man might 
drain it at the moment of its first leap into the sun- 
light. But Nature hides the spring away ; keeps it 
within the kindly and secret protection of the cool 
forest or the unyielding granite. Thus she nurses it 
into charm and fulness. As it flows, it grows. Its 
freedom gathers an access of volume and motion as 
it runs. Out of its fulness and its freedom, receiv- 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 147 

ing tribute from earth and sky and flower, yielding 
tribute to every thirsting thing, the brook leaps at 
last, as a tiny pulse, into the river's arm, that it may 
lift somewhat of the burden of the world. So all 
charm and all power have come out of a hidden 
place. So all life is first enfolded within the protec- 
tion of a tender and secret hand, that, with every 
potential force, it may belong at length to the labor 
and welfare of the years. If the spring had been 
given in its earliest moment to the thirst of one de- 
vouring avarice, the valleys would have lost their 
noblest and fairest wealth. And yet there are those 
who would build the factory, so often the symbol of 
our ruthless industrial impatience, over the heart- 
springs of the childhood of the South. 

The world cannot permit a single industry, or a 
half-dozen industries, to hold the child in an eco- 
nomic status which is out of touch with the assump- 
tions that underlie the industrial, educational, and 
humanitarian organization of our human life. Under 
these assumptions the function of the child is not 
productive but receptive. Upon the preservation of 
this function depends the child's future productive 
power. Its protection constitutes one of the strong- 
est as well as one of the holiest interests of civiliza- 
tion. The reversal of this function, upon a universal 
scale, would mean the degradation and extinction of 
the race. Within the heart of the child lie the well- 
springs of the future. Its freedom means the free- 
dom of our country. Its power, knit through the 
slow ye^rs of free and happy growth, means the 
power of our armies. Its play, its joy, its growing 
knowledge, its simple and radiant courage, the smil- 



148 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ing, teasing challenge of its irresponsibilities and 
immunities, constitute (if we will preserve them in 
their unspoiled freshness) the indestructible sources 
of the power, the dignity, the culture, the laughter, 
the freedom, of a great people. 

For, my friends, these children are no mere factors 
of industry. They are vital and personal factors of 
our country and of our humanity. They are heirs 
with us of this immediate and present day, this day 
of vivid human interests, — of imperious reciprocities, 
of ever enlarging fidelities between land and land, be- 
tween class and class, between life and life. They 
are the heirs with us of a deeper and more compel- 
ling patriotism. Back of the patriotism of arms, back 
of the patriotism of our political and civic Hfe, there 
lies, like a new and commanding social motive, the 
patriotism of efficiency. Every interest, every insti- 
tution, every activity of our day must reckon with it. 
It is not merely the patriotism of industrial power. 
It is the patriotism of social fitness and of economic 
value. It is the passion of usefulness. It is the love 
of being useful, and, therefore, the love of helping 
others into usefulness. The man must be worth 
something to his country ; his country must be worth 
something to the world. In the interest of our coun- 
try and of our world, it covets for every human life 
that emancipation which means the freeing of capacity. 

It is this patriotism which we shall invoke. North 
and South, in behalf of every wounded, helpless, 
defenceless element of our industrial society. It 
realizes that the good of one life comes only out of 
the fulness of all life ; that no power is safe which 
reposes solely upon the weakness of another ; that 



V CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH 149 

no liberty is safe which depends upon the slavery of 
another ; that no knowledge is safe or sound which 
bases itself upon the ignorance of another ; and that 
no wealth has reached the fulness of its distinction 
and its happiness which depends for its existence 
solely upon the poverty of others. It is to the im- 
mediate interest of every man, that every other man 
should have something to give. In so far as every 
life becomes a producer and a contributor, every 
other life becomes a beneficiary. Thus the meaning 
of patriotism is but the nerve and instinct of so- 
ciety. To bring others into their own believing, 
hoping, and loving, — this is religion ; to share with 
others the powers of acquiring, and thriving, and 
rejoicing, — this is wealth; to open to others the 
liberties of thinking, and knowing, and achieving, 
— this is education ; to enlarge for others the glory 
of living, — this is life ; to behold the great throng- 
ing masses of men alive and radiant with those ca- 
pacities and efficiencies which redeem the waste 
and silence of the world, — this is indeed the supreme 
efficiency, and this I believe to be the supreme 
patriotism. 



THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 



Politically, there still exists "the solid South"; 
yet, for the more intimate phases of Southern opinion 
in relation to the most serious of Southern problems, 
no one may speak as a representative authority. In 
the presence of the negro, we may say truly that the 
mind of the South is of many minds. Just as the 
negro divides the sentiment of the North, he divides 
the sentiment of the South. 

Under the different conditions obtaining to-day in 
our industrial and political life, from year to year 
and from place to place, the negro is different and 
the white man is different. In each locality of the 
South, the problem is, therefore, a different problem. 
Ultimately, of course, the problem is one — is the 
mutual social, industrial, and political adjustment 
upon the same soil, of two races between whom the 
difference in color is perhaps the most superficial of 
the distinctions which divide them. 

As this fundamental problem, however, is presented 
under the concrete working conditions of Southern 
life, it assumes a different phase in each State of 
the South, in each county of the several States, and 
even in the separate communities of each particular 

153 



154 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



county.-' When studied in the city where the white 
population slightly outnumbers the black, where 
churches and schools are provided, and police pro- 
tection is abundant, the racial conditions of such a 
State as Alabama present one problem ; in an adjoin- 
ing county, where the negroes outnumber the white 

^ "The variety of conditions in different parts of a single State is 
often greater than would be imagined. If one were to say that certain 
counties of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama contain 
fewer negroes than certain counties of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massa- 
chusetts, or Rhode Island, it might awaken surprise. But the figures 
for a number of counties in the South are as follows : — 





Total 


Negroes 




Total 


Negroes 


Garrett, Md. 


17,701 


126 


Unicoi, Tenn. 


5,581 


130 


Buchanan, Va. 


9,692 


5 


Union, Tenn. 


12,894 


79 


Graham, N.C. 


4,343 


26 


Van Buren, Tenn. 


3,326 


37 


Fentress, Tenn. 


6,106 


25 


Towns, Ga. 


4,748 


71 


Pickett, Tenn. 


5>366 


II 


Cullman, Ala. 


9,554 


21 


Sequatchie, Tenn. 


3>326 


37 


Winston, Ala. 


17,849 


7 



"The twelve counties contain 90,756 people, of whom 575 are 
negroes, a single negro to 175 of the population. Nantucket Island, 
Mass., contains more negroes than most of these counties. 

" But again it may cause surprise to find how small is the proportion 
of white people in some counties. In Issaquena County, Mississippi, 
only six people in every hundred are white, and there are five other 
counties in which the per cent is less than ten. In fourteen counties 
in the South, seven-eighths of the people are negroes; in fifty-four 
counties, three-quarters; and in one hundred and eight counties, two- 
thirds. The great difference in race proportions in different counties 
is shown in Alabama, for example, where the proportion varies from 
Winston County, in which there are only seven negroes, to Lowndes, 
in which they number over thirty thousand. 

" It needs no argument to show that the ' negro problem ' is quite 
a different thing in Winston from what it is in Lowndes." — George 
S. DiCKERMAN, in the Southern Workman, Hampton, Va., January, 
1903. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 155 

people six to one, where both races are poor, where 
schools and churches are not numerous or usually 
impressive, where the constabulary is necessarily in- 
adequate, our racial conditions present what may be 
readily understood to be a very different problem 
indeed. 

Even in the rural South, the problem, as suggested 
by one of my correspondents, varies from neighbor- 
hood to neighborhood. It is one thing in those 
regions of light and sandy soil where the farms of 
the white man and the negro adjoin, where the white 
man's farm is cultivated by his own labor, where the 
negro is not to any large extent a dependent class, 
and where the relation of master and servant exists 
but to a slight degree ; it is another thing where the 
negro exists in large numbers as a working class 
upon the plantation of the white man. It assumes 
still another phase in the regions of black and heavy 
soil, where the white man who owns the land finds it 
too unhealthful to work his own plantation, and the 
large negro population comes into personal relations 
only with boss, overseer, or superintendent. In our 
mining regions, moreover, where the negro comes 
into direct contact with the white man, not as a land- 
owner or overseer, but as a fellow-laborer, often with 
the foreign laborer, we find a different problem still. 
The problem differs not only from locality to locality, 
but from man to man. There is a personal equation 
as well as a local equation. 

And in addition to a personal and a local equation 
there is a class equation. In certain sections of the 
South the negroes themselves are different from those 
in other sections. Those negroes of Virginia who 



156 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

have been reared in proximity to the white popula- 
tion of the higher type, reflect in aspiration, in 
character, in manner, the better quaUties of their 
environment. The negroes of other sections who are 
the descendants of those inferior slaves that were 
"weeded out" of the better plantations and " sold 
South," present a far more difficult situation. 

And the white population, also, has its social classi- 
fications. Between the more intelligent negroes and 
the representatives of the planter-class — the old aris- 
tocracy — there is little if any friction. But between 
the negro of any class and the representative of the 
"plain people," the people whose energies are 
re-creating the fortunes of the land, whose preju- 
dices are quite as vigorous as their industry, who 
have never known the negro at his best and have too 
often seen him at his worst, — between the new negro 
and the new white man, there is likely to be enmity 
and there is very sure to be suspicion. The Southern 
white man also presents those marked varieties of 
temperament and disposition which go everywhere 
with a greater complexity and a deeper refinement of 
social organization. He differs also under the chang- 
ing and instructive forces of travel, of education, of 
experience. From class to class, from man to man, 
as well as from place to place, what has been called 
"the problem of the races" assumes a distinctive 
phase and becomes a different problem. 

Dwelling upon still another aspect of our Southern 
situation, the writer addressed the following words, 
in March of 1900, to a representative audience in the 
city of Philadelphia : " Under wholly normal and 
natural conditions our race perplexities at the South 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 157 

would have been serious enough. You have found 
them serious here. Those of you who are familiar 
with Du Bois's book ^ on the subject of ' The Phila- 
delphia Negro ' know the humiliating difficulties of 
the problem in a city which is so resourceful in its 
educational and humanitarian provisions that we, of 
smaller and poorer communities, are wont to look 
upon you as just one great organized compassion. 
If here you have found the task one of such sadden- 
ing perplexity, what will you say of the difficulties of 
this task when presented under the conditions of 
Southern life .'' If the negro in Philadelphia presents 
a problem which you have not solved in justice either 
to the negro or to yourselves, what would you do 
with him under conditions which should multiply by 
fifty fold his numbers in your midst, which should 
multiply the burden of his illiteracy and should increase 
his tendencies to indolence ; under conditions which 
should make his freedom the legacy of a desolating 
war, under changes which had torn him from one 
place in the social organism and had not fitted him 
to another, which had removed him as a slave with- 
out fitting him for freedom ? What would you do 
with him under conditions which, through the admin- 
istrative poHcy of his liberators, had then placed him 
in the care of those who, representing neither the 
conscience of the victors nor the dignity of the van- 
quished, befriended him solely to despoil his truest 
friends ; who, after using him for the humiliation of 
his master, left him shorn indeed of his shackles, but 

1 " The Philadelphia Negro, A Sociological Study," l^y W. E. Burg- 
hardt Du Bois ; Philadelphia, The American Academy of Political and 
Social Science, 1899. 



IS8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

shorn also of that heritage of care which the weak 
should possess in the compassions of the strong ? 
What could you have done with a problem, naturally 
so difficult, that had been left to you under the con- 
ditions of military defeat, with its prostrating influ- 
ence upon social enthusiasm and civic hopefulness ; 
under conditions of economic depression, of industrial 
exhaustion and personal poverty — compelling the 
worthier classes of the white population into so 
intense a struggle for rehabilitation that the very 
necessities of survival forced the superior race partly 
to ignore the weaker ; under conditions of antago- 
nistic legislation from an alien but dominant party 
government, and often under the provocations of 
harsh and self-sufficient criticism from those who 
judged where they could not know, and who advised 
where they had not suffered ? You may not think as 
I think, but suppose these were the things you did 
think ; suppose you had not only the negro in Phila- 
delphia, but Philadelphia and the negro together 
under such conditions as I have named, conditions 
which you yourselves should really view as the great 
masses of our people have viewed our conditions at 
the South. I think you will see that there is to-day 
with us not the negro problem only, under its varied 
personal and local phases, but other problems with it, 
and I think you will understand me, therefore, if I 
say that when a man attempts to discuss the negro 
problem at the South, he may begin with the negro, 
but he really touches, with however light a hand, the 
whole bewildering problem of a civilization." 

The difficulties of the situation are not simplified 
by the fact that this civilization is included within a 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 159 

larger civilization and a more democratic order, and 
that every problem of the one necessarily emerges 
under its varying political and industrial forms as a 
problem of the other. It is still true that there is 
one sense in which the problem itself is profoundly 
sectional. Locally as well as historically the negro 
question is a Southern question. Seven-eighths of 
the negro population are in the South, and they are 
in the South to stay. There will be occasional move- 
ments northward. Long-established negro *' colonies" 
in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati 
will continue to increase in numbers. But these peo- 
ple, in the mass, and because of the silent, unyielding 
sway of climatic and industrial forces, will remain south 
of an imaginary line connecting the cities of Washing- 
ton and St. Louis. Even within this Southern terri- 
tory, it is evident that it is the lower South, the South 
within the South, which is receiving the largest rela- 
tive increase in the number of its negroes. 

And yet, while this is true, it is also true that there 
are two aspects of our question under which it must 
assume a national form. Although the larger pro- 
portion of the black population lies within the South, 
the actual number of negroes at the North is steadily 
increasing ; and the national distribution of the negro 
as a factor of population involves the national 
distribution of the negro as a problem of American 
civilization.^ From being a problem which was once 

1 The city in the United States having the largest number of negroes 
in 1900 was Washington, D.C., with 86,702 ; then follow Baltimore 
(79,258), New Orleans (77,714), Philadelphia (62,613), and New 
York (60,666). It will be noted that only one city south of Washing- 
ton has as large a negro population as the city of New York. 



l6o THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

accorded a wrong solution in one section of our coun- 
try, it has become, for every section of our country, a 
problem which has received no adequate solution 
whatever. 

The issues presented by the negro in American life 
are national, however, in no merely geographical sense. 
They are national because of the principles, because 
of the industrial and political assumptions, which they 
involve. The national welfare is the larger context 
of every local problem ; and while the negro question 
finds its locality in the South, it must find its ultimate 
adjustment — if it ever receives adjustment — in the 
conscience, the wisdom, the knowledge, the patience, 
the courage of the Nation. The problem under its 
older form was created by the complicity of the 
Nation. The problem under its later forms has been 
created by the deliberate enactments of the Nation. 
The Nation, including the South, the West, the East, 
the North, cannot be permitted to evade responsi- 
bilities which it has always been zealous to accept 
but which it has not always been so zealous to dis- 
charge. Least of all can the South be a party to 
that evasion. If national action could be really in- 
spired by the wholesome and constructive spirit of a 
truly national policy, could be pursued really in the 
interest of the whole people, rather than in the in- 
terest of sectional bitterness or partisan advantage, 
it would bring significant and lasting benefits. Too 
often, however, the policies which have been pro- 
posed in the Nation's name have been so pursued 
as to bring the negro into American Hfe as an issue 
of sectionalism rather than as an occasion for nation- 
ality, — nationality of temper, of sympathy, of pur- 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO i6i 

pose. It is not enough to say that government by 
parties is inevitable. There are some crimes of which 
even parties ought to be incapable. 

I have not hesitated to speak of the presence of 
the negro in American life as a "problem." We 
have been told that the negro should be regarded not 
as a problem but as a man. There is truth in the 
suggestion. And yet out of this truth there arises 
the problem — he is a man, and yet a man unlike, 
in history and in racial character, the men about him. 
Every man, white or black, presents a problem. The 
problem increases in perplexity when to the charac- 
teristics of the individual are added the characteristics 
which distinguish and differentiate the group — social, 
national, or racial — with which he is associated. 
When this group is brought into contact with another 
group, or with other groups, the elements of com- 
plexity are increased. The problem grows. Russia's 
former serfs — struggling out of bondage in one form 
and hardly attaining liberty in any form — present a 
Russian problem. Her student-bodies — struggling 
for the broadest realities of democracy under auto- 
cratic conditions — present another problem. Where 
the anomalous conditions are created not from within 
but by forces and elements from without, the problem 
is greater still. The Russian in China is a Chinese 
problem. The Jew in Russia is a Russian problem. 
The white man in Africa is an African problem. 
The African in America is, and will be for centuries, 
one of the problems of American life. 

Nor can we say that the negro presents not a prob- 
lem but a task. That would be to assume that the 
supreme need is the need of resources, material and 

M 



i62 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

moral, and that all could be well adjusted if there 
were sufficient power and sufficient patience. These, 
undoubtedly, are great needs. The task presents, 
however, not only the aspects of moral and physical 
difficulty but of intellectual confusion. If we all 
knew what to do and there were not the strength or 
the will to do it, the negro would present a task. Be- 
cause there is much strength and some will, and yet 
because no ten men have ever yet agreed as to what 
we should all do, the negro presents something more 
than a task ; h'e presents a problem. 

Fortunately, there is increasing agreement upon the 
programme presented by such institutions as Hamp- 
ton and Tuskegee. And yet this programme is rightly 
and obviously but a programme of beginnings. That 
is its supreme success ; and that is its Hmitation. What 
lies beyond .'' What, politically and socially, is the 
termimts ad qiieni, the far-on result, of such wise and 
righteous training ? Before that question men divide. 
It is altogether probable that large numbers of men, 
white and black, North and South, have united upon 
the support of this programme for wholly dissimilar or 
for antagonistic reasons. All are agreed that this is 
the next step. The next step to what ? Before that 
question will rise all the ancient and lurid spectres 
of misapprehension and suspicion. 

II 

As the negro problem has been presented at the 
North and in the South — its more especial local 
home — it has apparently assumed, within the past 
five years, certain more acute and more serious forms. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 163 

To these unfortunate developments the whole situation 
has contributed, from the side of the negro and from 
the side of the white man. And yet, while it is true 
that there are grave evidences of loss, it is equally- 
true that there are marked evidences of gain. Prog- 
ress has been coincident with retrogression. Many 
of our difficulties are due to the delinquencies of the 
negro ; quite as many, however, are due to his ad- 
vancement. Nor do the difficulties of the problem 
lie wholly with the negro. At the South, the pro- 
cesses of social evolution which were accentuated, if 
not inaugurated, by the issue of the Civil War had 
their profound effect upon the life of the negro 
masses. They have also involved, however, the life 
of the white masses, and have set to work within 
it certain forces of transformation which, for many 
years, must bear with insistent pressure upon the 
fortunes both of the negro and of the South. Let 
us turn, first of all, to the consideration of some of 
the social changes wrought in the masses of negro 
life by the issue of emancipation. 

Slavery was nothing if not a system of restraint. 
This restraint was sometimes expressed in ignoble 
and brutal forms. It was sometimes expressed in 
the forms of a kindly and not ungenerous paternal- 
ism. But, good or bad, it held the race in check. 
It imposed its traditional limitations, it exercised a 
directive and restrictive oversight. It was bondage. 

This bondage fixed, instinctively, a limit beyond 
which the negro must not ascend ; it fixed a Hmit be- 
low which the negro must not fall. It operated in 
both directions as a check. To the negro who was 
inclined to rise into the larger liberties of thought and 



1 64 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

knowledge it opposed — it was compelled to oppose 
— its barriers. To the negro who was inclined to 
descend into the debilities of inefficiency and crime it 
also opposed — it was compelled to oppose — its bar- 
riers. As the race had come to these shores from a 
land of pitiless barbarism, the number of negroes 
who tended to fall below the standard of slavery was 
probably very much greater than the number who 
tended to rise above it. It is evident, therefore, that 
for some generations the net result of slavery was 
not, in its practical operation, a disadvantage to the 
masses of negro life. And yet the deep cry of the 
few who would aspire will always possess — in God's 
heart and in the heart of all our race — a more im- 
perious validity than the dark longing of the many 
who would descend. 

Upon the two tendencies of the negro thus held 
in check the effect of emancipation must be evident. 
Restraint withdrawn, negro life is released in two 
directions — the smaller number of better negroes is 
permitted to rise, and many of them do rise ; the 
larger number of weaker negroes is permitted to fall, 
and most of them do fall. It was inevitable. 

The South, the country as a whole, is confronted, 
therefore, with an upward and a downward tendency. 
We are in the presence of two different, two oppos- 
ing movements — the one serving at many points and 
in many ways to check the other, but each distinct 
and each representing the social momentum of 
natural and spontaneous forces. The masses of the 
race, released from the restraint which slavery im- 
posed, and isolated, through the pressure of political 
exigencies, from the sympathetic guidance of the bet- 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 165 

ter South, have shown many of the tendencies of 
moral and physical reversion. At certain points 
within the South, especially at points where the white 
population has represented the highest average of 
culture and character, these tendencies have been 
arrested. But it was to have been expected that, 
upon the whole, the masses of the negroes would first 
become worse before becoming better. 

And yet the process upward — although the story 
of a smaller number — must be borne clearly and 
steadily in mind. The failure of great masses of 
men — in the total life of any race — must not ob- 
scure the achievements of the few. Indeed, to the 
historian of the great ventures and experiments of 
civilization, the achievements of the few are of more 
significance than the failures of the many. For 
achievement — even though upon a small scale — is 
a demonstration of possibilities. It gives a starting- 
point for constructive theories and policies ; it gives 
authority to anticipation. 

It is no small thing that the illiteracy of the negro 
males of voting age has been reduced in the South- 
ern States from 88 per cent in 1870 to 52 per cent 
in 1900; and yet it is only when we turn to the more 
intimate victories, here and there, of individual men 
and women that we get the full measure of the 
negro's promise. Nor would I be disposed to seek 
that promise in the rare and exceptional attainments 
of the men of genius. Neither in the marked reduc- 
tion of the illiteracy of the masses nor in the marked 
distinction of such artists as Tanner or Dunbar or 
such leaders as Washington, Grant, and Walker can 
we seek the sure evidences of a people's essential 



i66 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

progress. All promise and all attainment are worth 
while, but the only adequate measure of social effi- 
ciency and the only ultimate test of essential racial 
progress lies in the capacity to create the home ; and 
it is in the successful achievement of the idea and the 
institution of the family, of the family as accepted 
and honored under the conditions of Western civiliza- 
tion, that we are to seek the real criterion of negro 
progress. 

For the very reason that the test is so severe — and 
yet so instinctively American — the weaknesses of 
the race will seem conspicuous and formidable. 
American society, as a whole, stands not unscathed 
in the white light of its own ideal. The heritage of 
the negro — his heritage from slavery and from the 
darker age which preceded slavery — has given him 
but small equipment for the achievement of this task. 
And yet the negro home exists. That its existence 
is, in many cases, but a naive pretence, that negro 
life often proceeds upon its way with a disregard — 
partly immoral, partly non-moral — of our accepted 
marital conditions, is evident enough. And yet those 
who would observe broadly and closely will find a 
patiently and persistently increasing number of true 
families and real homes, a number far in excess of 
the popular estimate, homes in which with intelli- 
gence, probity, industry, and an admirable simplicity, 
the man and the woman are creating our fundamental 
institution. Scores of such homes, in some cases 
hundreds, exist in numbers of our American com- 
munities — exist for those who will try to find them 
and will try, sympathetically, to know them. But one 
of the traffic elements of our situation lies in the fact 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 167 

that of this most honorable and most hopeful aspect 
of negro life the white community, North or South, 
knows practically nothing. Of the destructive fac- 
tors in negro life the white community hears to the 
uttermost, hears through the press and police court ; 
of the constructive factors of negro progress — the 
negro school, the saner negro church, the negro home 
— the white community is in ignorance. Until it does 
know this aspect of our negro problem it may know 
more or less accurately many things about the negro ; 
but it cannot know the negro. 

The white man. North as well as South, feels — and 
feels wisely — that the social barrier should remain. 
So long, however, as it remains it shuts out not only 
the negro from the white man but the white man 
from the negro. Seeing the negro loafer on the 
streets, the negro man or woman in domestic service, 
the negro laborer in the fields, is not seeing the negro. 
It is seeing the negro on one side. It is seeing the 
negro before achievement begins, often before achieve- 
ment — the achievement which the world esteems — 
is possible. Knowing the white man only under those 
conditions would not be knowing the white man. 
Yet this side of the negro is usually the only side of 
which the white community has direct and accurate 
knowledge. It is the knowledge of industrial con- 
tact, and of industrial contact upon its lower plane. 
It is not the knowledge of reciprocal obligations, of 
social revelation. And at the point where this lower 
contact ceases, at the point where the negro's real 
efficiency begins, and he passes out of domestic ser- 
vice or unskilled employment into a larger world, the 
white community loses its personal and definite infor- 



1 68 THE PRESENT SOUTH CHAP. 

mation ; the negro passes into the unknown. As the 
negro attains progress, he, by the very fact of prog- 
ress, removes the tangible evidence of progress from 
the immediate observation of the white community. 
Thus the composite idea, the social conception of the 
negro which is beginning to obtain among us, is de- 
termined more largely by the evidences of negro 
retrogression or negro stagnation than by the evi- 
dence, the real and increasing evidence, of negro 
advancement. 

Nor is the inadequacy of the composite picture of 
the negro due only to the way in which the social 
cleavage between the races imposes its limitation 
upon the vision of the white community. The in- 
adequacy of the picture is due to subjective as well 
as to objective causes. A partly mistaken concep- 
tion of the negro has resulted from the fact that 
the white world does not see the negro at his best ; 
it has also resulted from the fact that the white world 
which now sees the negro habitually, which judges 
him and speaks of him most constantly, is not infre- 
quently the white world at its worst. How large a 
number of the white world, upon its educated side, 
have ever really seen the life of a negro home, or the 
life of the negro school, or the life of the saner negro 
church .'' The conception of the old-time darky is a 
national heritage, a heritage more sacred to the South 
than those outside the South can always understand. 
That conception, however, as it lives in the conscious- 
ness of our domestic and Hterary life, is due not to 
one factor only but to two. It was the result, like 
all conceptions, of the thing seen and the seeing eye. 
It was not due alone to the negro of our older age. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 169 

It was due to the eye which looked upon him, which 
judged broadly his qualities of character, which 
had regard to his fidelities, and which understood, 
with the humor, the patience, the magnanimity of an 
educated class, the occasions of the negro's failure. 
The conception of the old-time darky is thus a 
double contribution, the contribution of the better 
negro as known and interpreted to us through the 
better heart of the older South. 

But the mind of that older South no longer domi- 
nates the visual habits, the racial prepossessions of 
Southern life. The political and industrial reorgani- 
zation of the South has formed a new democracy, a 
democracy which has brought into its fellowship the 
neglected masses of the white population, which has 
been forced to seek its basis of organization upon the 
one ground of the unity of race ; and within this larger 
white world — alert, vigorous, confident, assertive — 
many of the old attitudes of spirit have passed away. 
An educated minority may transfer to the crude mul- 
titudes of a new order a sense of power, a sense of 
freedom, a sense of responsibility, but not its more 
intimate phases of temper, of individuaHty — its ur- 
banities, its genial humor, its share in those perva- 
sive charities which spring from a sense of leisure 
and from an assured consciousness of power, quite as 
much as from a fertile earnestness of heart. 

The old South does last on within the new, the old 
South with its magnanimity and its poise ; and, here 
and there, in numberless men and women and in 
many establishments of city and country, one may 
still observe the persistence and charm of that amaz- 
ing patience with which the South has served the 



I70 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

negro while the negro has served the South. And 
yet these forces are no longer dominant. The new 
world which has resulted from our political and in- 
dustrial reorganization has brought into power vast 
multitudes of the unlettered and the untrained, a 
white population possessing all the pride, all the 
energy, all the assertiveness of the older order, with- 
out its experience or its culture. It does not always 
rule. It has usually been so wise and so sincere as to 
choose its leaders from the ranks of trained and at least 
educated men ; but among these it has usually chosen 
those who were fitted to understand it and to serve it 
rather than those who would instruct it. Have North- 
ern constituencies wrought otherwise .'' But when the 
cruder forces of the South have found themselves in 
the possession of nobler leaders, chosen by them or 
chosen for them by the occasional influence of the 
commercial and professional classes, the masses of the 
people have been quick to respond to the appeal of 
every free and upbuilding purpose ; and here lies the 
promise of the future. As yet, however, it is too soon 
to expect that the new and untrained elements of the 
white democracy will view the negro otherwise than 
from their own personal and present and actual stand- 
point. In States where, in many localities, more than 
20 per cent of the white men of voting age are illiter- 
ate ; where the rural population which can read and 
write does actually read and write but little ; where 
large numbers of the people have known nothing 
of the slave except as the representative of a hated 
competitive labor, and where the negro in freedom 
has lost many of the virtues of his bondage, it is im- 
possible to suppose that ignorant men will judge the 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 171 

negro, or any other factor of experience, otherwise 
than ignorantly. Even where knowledge is greater 
and experience broader, the popular conception of 
the negro is largely determined by the impressions 
that arise among the ignorant. Almost every family 
makes, in thought and expression, an " honorable ex- 
ception " of the servants of its own household, the 
negroes it really knows ; but the collective concep- 
tion, the composite picture of the negro, is too often 
the negro as interpreted through the medium of an un- 
trained public opinion, an opinion sometimes voiced in 
the rant of the political hustings, in sensational press 
reports, in the rumors of the street. The mind of 
the white world, as it sees and judges the negro, is 
thus not the mind of the white world at its best, It 
is a mind now influenced by the presence within it 
in abnormal proportions, of unsympathetic and untu- 
tored forces ; forces which are gaining daily, however, 
in both sympathy and training ; forces which may 
well be the occasion, therefore, of no inconsiderate 
pessimism but of a reasonable and wholesome faith, 
a faith which the true citizen of a democracy gives, 
and is bound to give, to every social possibihty of his 
country's hfe. 

Ill 

We may be tempted to say, therefore, that the 
kindlier conception of the old-time negro resulted 
from the fact that the white world at its best was 
looking upon the negro at his best ; the harsher con- 
ception of the present negro resulting from the fact 
that a white world which is not at its best is looking 
upon the negro at his worst. The generalization 



172 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

thus expressed may be too clearly drawn, and yet 
it is sufficiently evident that just at this period in the 
history of the South the two races have entered 
into new conditions, and that under these conditions 
their relations to each other are at many points the 
relations of disadvantage. The necessary social 
cleavage between the races forces the negro — as he 
rises — to rise out of the familiar view of the white 
community. The race secures little credit for its 
actual, its most significant, gains. The white world 
has been influenced both in thought and in action, 
not merely by the fact that negro progress has been 
obscured, but by the fact that its own vision has been 
affected by the rapid and overwhelming rise of a 
great class — possessing the hereditary antipathies 
of race, accentuated by the economic antipathies of 
all free labor toward the labor of the slave. To the 
resulting conception of negro life, to the inadequacy 
of this composite picture of negro experience, — limi- 
tations due to the thing seen and to the seeing eye, 
— we may attribute some of the serious signs of popu- 
lar exasperation, and many of the more recent evi- 
dences of racial friction. 

That these evidences have not been confined to the 
Southern States is now one of the commonplaces of 
current observation. And where racial irritation has 
arisen at the North, it has been due largely to the same 
causes, to the popular ignorance of the better phases 
of negro life, and to the preponderance, in many of 
our American cjties, of uncontrolled and " difficult " 
human masses. Yet there is present there another 
factor which is also present in the South, and 
which contributes its sinister and baffling element 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 173 

to the composite picture upon which I have just 
dwelt. This factor is the "criminal" negro; numeri- 
cally not a large proportion of the race, but as a 
factor of disturbance one of the baneful as well as 
one of the most formidable of social forces.^ The 
number of such negroes is relatively small, and yet 
it has assumed a morbid and unfortunate importance. 
To this importance three influences have contributed. 
First, the distinctively criminal negro is often 
guilty of unusual and abnormal crimes. He is asso- 
ciated in the pubUc mind with one crime, particu- 
larly, which is unspeakable in its brutality and 
infamy. It is true that this crime has sometimes 
been charged against the innocent ; that is true of all 
crimes. It is also true — as has been suggested — 
that the number of such crimes is relatively small ; 
and yet it must not be forgotten that, in order to 
shield the victim, the suppression of the news of this 
crime is often as significant as its exaggeration. But 
the fact that the criminals of this class are so few in 
number, should make the attitude of the public mind 
in dealing with them a task of simplicity and ease. 
And yet, because of the deep forces of inter-racial 
suspicion, a crime which should be the very last 
crime to present any other than an essential human 

^ Negro crime seems to be proportionately greater at the North 
than at the South — due probably to the fact that at the North the 
negro is found under the conditions of the city, while at the South he 
lives chiefly under the simpler and more wholesome conditions of the 
country. The percentage of crime is, in both sections, much larger for 
the negro than for the white population, and the statement of the text 
as to the small proportion of criminal negroes refers only to the degen- 
erate roving type, peculiarly irresponsible, and guilty of the more serious 
offences. 



\ 



174 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

issue between good and evil, has been made one of 
the most complex and difficult of " questions," the 
occasion for some of the most irreducible points 
in the discussion of racial issues. I think it must 
be fairly said that the difficulties of the situation are 
chargeable to false conditions in the public opinion 
of both races. Negro opinion, organized and unor- 
ganized, has seemed to be too protective ; white 
opinion has too often been lawlessly retributive. 

That negro opinion, unorganized and uninstructed, 
should be inclined to protect even the more degraded 
criminal may be easily explained though not excused. 
A weaker race constantly subjected to indiscriminate 
attack is likely to undertake an indiscriminate defence. 
The very intensity of external criticism produces, in an 
ignorant and untrained human mass, a morbid and 
exaggerated solidarity. It is the blind moving of the 
instinct of self-protection. The race, however mis- 
takenly, feels that it must "stand together." A dis- 
position upon the part of the white world — the 
stronger race — to judge the negro with firm but 
clear discrimination and to administer exact justice 
under the law would probably result in a gradual but 
effective counter movement within the negro masses, 
a movement to yield the guilty up to the processes of 
trial. It is not, however, to the interest of the negro 
that this movement should await the arrival of millen- 
nial conditions among the white race, and that the 
development of a firmer attitude toward negro crime 
should be delayed until the arrival of juster class 
conceptions. The negro often assumes that he alone 
is subjected to the prejudices of class, whereas almost 
every element of society is compelled to face them 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 175 

and to bear with them. The Jew has confronted 
them for centuries, in America the German faces them 
among the Irish, the Irishman faces them among the 
Germans, the Italian meets them at every point, and 
— long after national idiosyncrasies have been 
effaced — the poor man encounters them in the pres- 
ence of the rich man, the rich man confronts them 
in the jury composed of poor men. 

It is in the negro's own interest that the negro 
criminal should receive the penalty of his crime, for 
the protection of the criminal means the demoraliza- 
tion of every social standard. In rural sections of 
our country there is often the fear that the accused — 
if surrendered — will be ruthlessly punished without 
trial ; but the tendency among the negro masses to 
protect the criminal is also operative in the cities — 
even in cities like New York or Boston or Phila- 
delphia — where there is every assurance that trial 
will be accorded. 

To negro opinion, as expressed in the formal 
declarations of representative assemblies, we must 
naturally look for a definite quality of leadership. 
Yet these declarations have left much to be desired. 
The denunciations of wrong usually place the word 
" alleged " before all direct reference to serious of- 
fences, and the deprecations of " alleged " crime are 
usually coupled with conspicuous counter charges 
against the similar crimes of white men. The domi- 
nant note, even to sympathetic observers, has seemed 
defensive, exculpatory, rather than decisively cor- 
rective ; an appeal to the world rather than an honest, 
wholesome word at home. More recently these ex- 
pressions have seemed to take a better tone, and 



176 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

under the rapidly broadening influence of the wiser 
and stronger negro leaders, I believe we shall soon 
find that the organized opinion of the race will 
reflect the standards of a sympathetic but effective 
self-correction. 

And how has the white race — in its knowledge 
and pride and power — dealt with the problem of the 
negro criminal .-' Surely, not too well. The average 
criminal, the negro charged with commonplace or 
familiar crimes, is — in the South at least — at no 
unusual disadvantage. If brought before the court 
he is sometimes punished with undue severity ; and 
he is sometimes punished with absurd leniency. 
Petty crimes are often forgiven him, and in countless 
instances the small offences for which white men are 
quickly apprehended are, in the negro, habitually 
ignored. The world hears broadly and repeatedly of 
the cases of injustice, it hears little of those more 
frequent instances in which the weaknesses of a 
child-race are accorded only an amused indifference 
or a patient tolerance by their stronger neighbors. 
That such an attitude has its disadvantages as well as 
its advantages for the negro need not be forgotten. 

Dealing with the negro criminal of the baser type, 
white opinion has too often attempted to answer law- 
lessness with lawlessness and ferocity with ferocity. 
To the popular mind the crimes against women appear 
not only as attacks upon the individual but as attacks 
upon the integrity of race. They are occasions both 
of personal offence and of race humiliation.^ They 

1 See a paper by the Hon. Alex C. King of Atlanta, Ga., in the 
Proceedings of the Conference on the Race Problems of the South, 
p. 160; the B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., Richmond, Virginia. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 177 

are often so intended by the criminal and are often so 
accepted by the white community. The peculiar 
horror of the crime, the morbid sense of race injury 
which it arouses, the tendency of innocent negroes to 
protect the guilty, all unite to produce a degree of 
emotional tension, a condition of social hysteria which 
few who have not endured the experience can under- 
stand. Add to the difficulties of the situation a wholly 
inadequate constabulary — inadequate because the 
South is not merely poor but so largely rural that 
efficient police organization is practically impossible 
— and the conditions for the rise of the mob are at 
once apparent.^ 

The mob, so far as it has had a conscious philos- 
ophy, has attempted the justification of its course upon 
these grounds : — It has insisted that its methods were 
necessary in order to prevent the crime ; in order to 
avoid the procrastination of the courts ; and in order 
to protect the victim of assault from the ordeal of 
presenting testimony at the trial of the offender. 

1 The inadequacy of a rural constabulary has not been sufficiently 
considered in accounting for the presence of lynch law at the South. 
That the mob tendencies are active in many Eastern localities is 
evident from the large number of " attempted " lynchings. A score of 
these have been noted in the limits of the city of New York within the 
period of a year. In some cases the accused was actually in the hands 
of the infuriated crowd. The lynching was prevented by an efhcient 
constabulary. Given, however, the conditions of rural life in our 
Southern States, where farms are widely scattered, with poor roads, 
infrequent railway service, limited telegraph facilities, and few large 
centres of social organization, — and the " attempted " lynching has 
its intended issue. Within the cities of the South lynchings have 
been practically unknown. The cases of mob violence in the cities of 
such Northern States as Delaware, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois have 
few, if any, recent Southern parallels. 
N 



178 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

It has become increasingly obvious, however, that 
whatever the practice of lynching may or may not 
be, it is not a remedy. It does not prevent crime. 
Through the morbid interests which it arouses, and 
through the publicity which it creates, it inflames to 
the utmost the power of criminal suggestion and 
aggravates all the conditions of racial suspicion and 
antagonism. The so-called "remedy" has always 
been followed by new outbreaks of the disease, the 
most atrocious crimes coming at short intervals after 
the previous exercise of the mob's philosophy of 
"prevention." 

It is true that the procrastination of the courts has 
sometimes resulted in deep and pardonable irritation. 
Where the nature of the offence is peculiarly ab- 
horrent, where every circumstance has rightly se- 
cured for the victim the overwhelming sympathy of 
the public, and where the accused is a friendless 
member of a weaker race this irritation has some- 
times passed into uncontrollable exasperation. As a 
matter of fact, however, such procrastination is more 
frequent to the popular imagination than to the ob- 
server of real events. In the presence of the crime 
to which reference is made, American courts do not 
impose delays. " The delay of the courts " is in 
large measure a popular superstition. Where it 
occurs, it occurs not in cases where the accused is 
a helpless and ignorant member of society, but where 
the defence can command those resources of legal 
talent and of technical procedure which are possible 
only to the rich. In the cases of heinous crime, the 
American court. North or South, is usually conscious 
of its obligation to the community. Surely, if the 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 179 

end be justice rather than senseless and futile 
slaughter, the court is not inferior to the mob as 
the instrument of an intelligent social verdict. The 
crude theory that " the people " may resume their 
delegated powers has no place in a democratic order. 
The mob is not " the people " ; it is a temporary, 
feverish minority, possessing only an incidental co- 
herence, without a fixed identity, without continuity 
or responsibility — assuming the most august pre- 
rogatives of society. Every mob is, in truth, an 
attack upon " the people," for it acts in repudiation 
of those institutional forms which the majority have 
established. By its very existence it announces its 
violation of the social compact and its rejection of 
the freely established forms of popular administra- 
tion ; by its deliberate anonymity and its immediate 
dissolution it confesses its irresponsibility and de- 
clares that its deeds were usurpations. The only 
real instruments of " the people " for the administra- 
tion of social penalties are the constabulary and the 
courts, and these instruments the people have es- 
tablished in order that one man alone, and he the 
humblest, may not be without protection — if inno- 
cent — from even the collective power of the majority 
itself. For the constabulary and for the courts, 
promptness and decision are important. But the 
paramount and essential end of every true judicial 
process is not promptness but justice, is not " ven- 
geance " — individual or social — but the solemn and 
decisive determination of innocence or guilt. It is 
the business of the court to free the innocent, it is 
its business to set apart the guilty for the penalties of 
an outraged law. All reasonable haste, all possible 



i8o THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

diligence must be employed, but — as has been well 
suggested — in our effort to prevent the mob from 
turning itself into a court, let us not end by turning 
the court into a mob. 

The methods of the mob are also defended upon 
the ground that they serve to protect the victim of 
crime from the ordeal of publicly testifying in the 
case. Many have regarded this as the strongest 
argument in the mob's behalf. Yet when we have 
ehminated the cases — by far the greater number — ■ 
in which the prisoner of the mob was not even 
charged with any crime against women, but with 
arson or robbery or attempted murder ; and when 
we have eliminated, among the cases of assault 
against women, the number in which death has 
resulted and the victim is thus prevented from all 
testimony, legal or extra-legal, the number of cases 
which come within the traditional excuse is ex- 
tremely small. And even here, what is the high 
chivalry of the mob which some would substitute 
for the care and protection of an American court .-' 
Does the mob permit the woman to escape the ordeal 
of testimony .-* Does it accomplish the very protec- 
tion which it proposes ? Not at all. The judge has 
authority to clear the room of all but the direct 
parties to the case, has the power to spare the victim 

— under cross-examination — from any but the sim- 
pler and less offensive questions, has the right and 
would surely have the will — in the North or South 

— to arrange the place for the sitting of his court so 
as to provide effectively and considerately for the con- 
ditions of privacy. But under the regime of the 
mob, who is to protect the victim, in the hour of 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO i8i 

wretchedness, from the morbid and miscellaneous 
crowd about the rural home ? Posses of men are 
scouring the surrounding territory. Absent with 
them are probably her father, or her husband, or her 
brothers. As each suspected negro is caught, he 
must be brought back for identification, and the 
woman in her season of agony and humiliation is 
called upon, again and again, to face a different 
prisoner and to pass upon the question of his iden- 
tity. In the dim light of her little room she knows, 
and "all know, that error is possible. But she is 
forced to endure this thing — and not in such pri- 
vacy as the court affords, but often in the gaze of 
men — guards of the prisoner — whom she has never 
before seen. And this is all supposed to be chivalry. 
But men who have seen its crude devices do not call 
it so ; they regard it as a stupid, ignorant, pitiful 
travesty of reserve. The crime of which the prisoner 
is accused is perhaps the most unutterably infamous 
of human wrongs, and in a vague way men have felt 
it to be too personal, too domestic, to permit of for- 
mal rectification. Beneath this deep feeling there 
is a certain touch of truth. Nor is the court a per- 
fect instrument for the punishment of such a crime ; 
the crime is wholly outside our normal thinking and 
feeling ; it is, whether committed by black or white 
men, from the barbaric or the degenerate elements 
in our life ; it is out of the very pit. There can be 
no perfect instrument for its punishment, but the 
court is the best instrument that we have — best for 
the interests of privacy as well as for the interests 
of justice — and in the defence of our courts the 
very validity of our civilization is involved. The 



/ 



1 82 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

mob, as we have seen, violates the very canons of 
the chivalry which it presumes to guard ; it thrusts 
upon the victim of the crime an added martyrdom of 
publicity ; it increases by the power of criminal sug- 
gestion the crimes it has undertaken to prevent ; 
it substitutes the chance humor of an irresponsible 
minority for the deliberately established processes of 
the majority, and so becomes a peril both to justice 
and to freedom. 

IV 

I think it may be fairly said, however, that the 
relative number of lynchings is decreasing from year 
to year. In the South, especially, there is an evident 
disposition upon the part of the more influential press 
to accord to the negro the measure of exact justice 
before the law.^ That this ideal will be attained 

^ The expressions of such journals as the Constitution, of Atlanta, 
Ga., and the Advertisa-, of Montgomery, Ala., are noteworthy, and 
yet quite characteristic of the Southern press. 

Said the Constitution under date of June 27, 1903 : — 
" The time when the lynching of a certain breed of brutes could be winked 
at because of satisfaction that punishment came to him quickly and to the 
uttermost, has given way to a time when the greater peril to society is the 
mob itself that does the work of vengeance. Against the growth of that evil 
the best sense of the nation needs to combine and enforce an adequate 
protection." 

Said the Advertiser under dates of September 16 and October 6, 
1903: — 

" The white race has a duty which is imperative. It is a duty which is 
demanded by justice, by humanity, and by self-interest. Ours is and will 
ever be the governing race. It will elect the lawmakers, make the laws, and 
enforce them. That being so, that principle of eternal justice which bids the 
strong protect the weak, makes it our duty to protect the negro in all his 
legal, industrial, and social rights. W^e should see that he has equal and 
exact justice in the courts, that the laws bear alike on the black and the 
white, that he be paid for his labor just as the white man is paid, and that 
no advantage be taken of his ignorance and credulity. . . . 

" And the task is a simple and easy one. The courts and juries should 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 183 

immediately no one can predict. So long as any ele- 
ment of the population is, as a class, in a position of 
marked economic dependence upon stronger factions 
or classes, it will certainly suffer — however unfortu- 
nately or unjustly — from the pressure of civil and 
political prejudice. The intelligent negro may well 
ask of our public opinion a larger measure of dis- 
crimination ; and yet he may well lay the greater 
stress upon his gains rather than upon his losses. 
Certainly his gains will be of small avail if the con- 
templation of his wrongs shall supersede in his life 
the positive acceptance and the definite using of his 
rights. The consciousness of grievances is not an 
inspiring social asset for a class or for a race. There 
need be no surrender of essential principles, and yet 
stress may well be laid, confidently and hopefully, 
upon the privileges that are actually available for the 
negro in American life. Here, in the using of the 
positive liberties and advantages of education and of 
industry, of religious and political freedom, the negro, 
through the acceptance of a programme of positive 
progress, may enter into a larger heritage than is 
open to any like number of his race in any quarter 
of the world. Important are some of the advantages 
he has not ; but more important are the many advan- 
tages which he has. 

Nor can it be said that these advantages are Northern 

know no difference between whites and blacks when a question of right and 
justice is up for settlement. The man who employs a negro to work for him 
should deal as fairly with him as he would deal by a white man. The life of a 
negro who has done no wrong should be as sacred as the life of a white man. 
He is in our power, politically and otherwise, and justice, humanity, and 
good policy unite in demanding for him equal and exact justice. Keep the 
negroes among us, give them the full protection of the laws, and let them 
have justice in all things. That is the solution of the race question." 



1 84 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

rather than Southern. There are to-day almost nine 
milHons of negroes in the United States. After thirty 
years of freedom, nearly eight millions of them remain 
within the borders of the South. Why have they 
remained ? The broad and living decisions of great 
masses of men possess a dumb but interesting signifi- 
cance. They are never wholly irrational or senti- 
mental. The negro remains at the South because, 
among the primary and the secondary rewards of 
honest life, he gets more of the primary rewards at 
the South than at the North, There is no idle flat- 
tery of the South in this declaration of the Principal 
of Tuskegee : — 

"It is in the South that the black man finds an 
open sesame in labor, industry, and business that is 
not surpassed anywhere. It is here that that form of 
slavery which prevents a man from selling his labor 
to whom he pleases on account of his color, is almost 
unknown. We have had slavery in the South, now 
dead, that forced an individual to labor without a 
salary, but none that compelled a man to live in idle- 
ness while his family starved." 

The words are not too strong.^ The negro knows 
that in the essential struggle for existence the spirit 
of the South has been the spirit of kindliness and 
helpfulness. Nor is it true that the negro may there 
perform only the deeds of drudgery, or those petty 

1 Referring to the statistics of the United States Census for 1900 
(Vol. n, p. ccvii), Booker T. Washington says: " Here is the unique 
fact, that from a penniless population just out of slavery, 372,414 
owners of homes have emerged, and of these 255,156 are known to 
own their homes absolutely free of encumbrance. In these heads of 
negro families hes the pledge of my race to American civilization." — 
See the Tradesman, Chattanooga, Tenn., January i, 1904, p. 99. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 185 

offices that are the badges of a menial dependence. 
The negro at the South is preacher, teacher, physi- 
cian, and lawyer ; he is in the dry goods business, the 
grocery business, the livery business, the real estate 
business, the wood and coal business ; as well as in 
the business of running errands and blacking boots. 
He is shoemaker and carpenter and blacksmith. He 
is everywhere where there is anything to do, and 
if he can do it well, he is usually treated fairly 
and paid for it honestly. Except in professional 
capacities, he is employed by all, he does business 
with all. There is just one line drawn, however, 
and it is perhaps significant. In a Southern city, 
with the life of which I am familiar, there is a 
successful, respected negro man, with many indus- 
trial and commercial functions toward the community 
in which he lives. He is a keeper of carriages, a 
dealer in wood and coal, a butcher, and vendor of 
vegetables, — and an undertaker. There is one de- 
partment of his varied establishment which has never 
had the monetary support of the white population, 
and which is sustained entirely by the people of his 
own race. The white people of the city will buy 
their supplies of him, will purchase his wood and his 
coal, will leave their horses in his stables, and will 
ride in his carriages ; — but he may not bury their 
dead. There is in this simple incident a monograph 
upon the subject of the negro in the South. 

But the South gives to the negro something more 
merciful than sentiment and something more neces- 
sary than the unnegotiable abstractions of social right. 
The South gives to him the best gift of a civilization 
to an individual — the opportunity to live industri- 



1 86 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ously and honestly. As the representative of the 
negro race whom I have already quoted has also said, 
" If the negro would spend a dollar at the opera, he 
will find the fairest opportunity at the North ; if he 
would earn the dollar, his fairest opportunity is at the 
South. The opportunity to earn the dollar fairly is 
of much more importance to the negro just now than 
the opportunity to spend it at the opera." ^ The large 
and imperious development of trades-unionism at the 
North (the writer would not speak in criticism of 
organized labor in itself) is already eliminating the 
negro as an industrial factor. Du Bois's book on the 
negro in Philadelphia, to which I have already re- 
ferred, is but a rescript of the story of his life in every 
community at the East. Nothing could be more 
searchingly relentless than the slow, silent, pitiless 
operation of the social and economic forces that are 
destroying the negro, body and soul, in the Northern 
city. None knows it so well as the negro himself. 
The race-prejudice, which Professor Shaler of Har- 
vard has recently told us is as intense at the North as 
it is anywhere in the world, first forbids to the negro 
the membership of the labor union, and then forbids 
to the employer the services of non-union labor. If 

1 It is of some significance that in 1900 there were 732,362 farms 
operated by negroes in the South. We find that 150,000 Southern 
negroes now own their own farms, and 28,000 more are recorded as 
part owners. (Twelfth Census of the U.S., Vol. V, pp. xciii, 4, 172.) 
The value of the property in all the farms operated by negroes at the 
South was ;S$469,5o6,555. In more than half the counties of Virginia 
over 70 per cent of the negro farmers are owners or managers, and in ^;^ 
counties of the State the proportion is over 80 per cent. — See the inter- 
esting papers in the Southern Workman, Hampton, Va., for October, 
1902; and January, 1903. — See also the valuable monograph by Carl 
Kelsey, "The Negro Farmer"; Chicago, 111., Jennings and Pye, 1903. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 187 

the employer turn wholly to the non-union men, he 
finds that rather than work beside the negro, these 
usually throw down their tools and walk out of the door 

of factory or shop. And so the dreary tale proceeds. 
The negro at the North can be a waiter in hotel and ,- — ■ 
restaurant (in some) ; he can be a butler or footman 
in club or household (in some) ; or the haircutter or 
bootblack in the barber shop (in some) ; and I say 
"in some" because even the more menial offices of 
industry are being slowly but gradually denied to 
him. And what is the opportunity of such an envi- 
ronment to the development of self-dependence, what 
is the value to his labor of so inadequate and restricted 
a market for the complex capacities and the legitimate 
ambitions of an awakening manhood ? And what 
lies at the background of the man ? What of the 
family, the wife, the mother, the children .? What 
are the possibilities, there, of self-respect, of decency, 
of hope .'' what are the possibilities of bread ? 

The economic problem lies at the very heart of the 
social welfare of any race. The possibility of honest 
bread is the noblest possibility of a civilization ; and 
it is the indispensable condition of thrift, probity, and 
truth. No people can do what is right or love what 
is good if they cannot earn what they need. The 
South has sins for which she must give account ; but 
it may be fairly said that as yet the South has no 
problem so great, so intimately serious as this. The 
South has sometimes abridged the negro's right to 
vote, but the South has not yet abridged his right, in 
any direction of human interest or of honest effort, to 
earn his bread. To the negro, just now, the oppor- 
tunity, by honest labor, to earn his bread is very much 



i88 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

more important than the opportunity to cast his vote. 
The one opportunity is secondary, the other is pri- 
mary ; the one is incidental, — the greater number of 
enlightened peoples have lived happily for centuries 
without it, — the other is elemental, structural, indis- 
pensable ; it lies at the very basis of Hfe and integrity 
— whether individual or social. 

V 

It is not possible or desirable, however, to ignore 
the political issues created by the presence of the 
negro in our national life. If the negro were the 
only factor to be considered, the questions affecting 
his political status might be temporarily postponed. 
But the negro is, in some respects, the least of the fac- 
tors involved. The political and administrative organ- 
ization of our country is democratic. Its institutional 
assumptions are the assumptions of a free democracy. 
Before all questions which touch the political status 
of any race or class of men there arises the primary 
question as to the effect upon our country and its 
constitution, upon its civic customs and its habits of 
thought, of the creation of a serf-class, a fixed non- 
voting population. Such a class can be established 
and continued only through habitual disregard to all 
the moral presumptions of our organic law ; and such 
disregard, in its reactive influence upon those who 
continue it, must result in a lowering of political stand- 
ards and a vitiation of civic fibre, far more disas- 
trous to the strong than to the weak. Such practices 
may begin with class discriminations, but these dis- 
criminations soon forget their class distinctions ; white 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 189 

men end by using against white men the devices 
which they began by confining to black men ; the 
whole suffrage becomes corrupt; a corrupt suffrage 
eliminates from political leadership the men who are 
too free or too pure to use it ; it becomes the basis of 
control for an ever degenerating political leadership ; 
and what began as a denial of political privilege to 
a despised faction at the bottom results in the con- 
trol at the top of those very elements of an irrespon- 
sible ignorance which discrimination was intended 
to eliminate. The retrogressive forces which were 
dreaded in a faction become enthroned over all ; and 
the real mind and conscience of the State, in attempt- 
ing to secure their freedom by protecting themselves 
against the ignorant, are despoiled of their freedom 
through the very processes of their self-protection ; 
are put, by their own methods, in bondage to the 
cruder forces of society. 

The difficulties of the situation have been supremely 
serious, and complex beyond description. It is obvi- 
ously true — as has just been stated — that a democ- 
racy cannot consent to the establishment of a 
dependent class. And yet it is equally obvious that 
within a number of our Southern States that is pre- 
cisely what the negro is. He is so not primarily as 
the result of political proscription, but simply because 
he is so. A race which, while numbering from 30 to 
50 per cent of the population, contributes but 4 or 
5 per cent of the direct taxes of the State, is as yet 
in an economic status which does not square with 
those industrial assumptions which are as important 
as the political assumptions of a genuinely democratic 
order. The elementary contradiction of our situation 



I90 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

lies, therefore, just here — in the very presence within 
our hfe of the vast numbers of a backward and essen- 
tially unassimilable people. 

In the years following the Civil War the North 
asserted, sometimes with a ruthless impatience and 
often through unworthy instruments, but with the 
sincere conviction of the masses of her people, that 
the actual political administration of the Southern 
States must be squared with the democratic assump- 
tions of the Constitution. And the North was right. 
The South contended, upon the other hand, that 
where the choice must be made between civilization 
and democracy, between public order and a particular 
form of public order, between government and a spe- 
cific conception of government, — civilization, order, 
government are primary, and that any forms or con- 
ceptions of them — however sacred — must await the 
stable and efficient reorganization of social life. And 
the South was right. It was opportune for the North 
to declare that the freedman could not protect him- 
self unless given the ballot in the mass ; it was equally 
opportune for the South — with whole States where 
the negroes were a majority, with many counties 
where the number of black men was treble the num- 
ber of white men — to declare that the supreme ques- 
tion was not the protection of the negro but the 
protection of society itself ; that white supremacy, at 
that stage in the development of the South, was 
necessary to the supremacy of intelligence, adminis- 
trative capacity and public order, and involved even 
the existence of those economic and civic conditions 
upon which the progress of the negro was itself de- 
pendent. And here, also, the South was right. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 191 

The South was right and the North was right. 
The North was strong and the South was weak. 
The North imposed the forms of democracy. The 
South clung to the substance of government. 

Yet, because the very forms of government were 
democratic and because these forms of government 
were ruthlessly imposed by an irresistible and unsym- 
pathetic party power, the South in clinging to the 
very substance of civilization was compelled to main- 
tain a lie. Up to this point the historian will not 
accord to her the larger measure of blame for the 
moral tragedy which followed. The effort, however, 
to avert fraud and ignorance at one door admitted 
them at another. The effort to prevent the demoral- 
ization of government resulted — as has been sug- 
gested — in the compromise of all the safeguards of 
the suffrage. The growing youth of the South be- 
came habitually familiar with ever lowering political 
standards, as the subterfuges which were first em- 
ployed against the black man came to be employed 
between white men in the struggle of faction against 
faction within the party. The better heart of the 
South now rose in protest. An unlimited suffrage 
was impossible, but the limitation of the suffrage 
must be established not by fraud or force but under 
legal conditions, and must be determined by a fixed 
and equitable administration. 

Thus the deeper moral significance of the recent 
constitutional amendments of the Southern States 
does not lie in the exclusion of the negro. The 
exclusion of the negro had long since* beeii accom- 
plished. It lies in the emancipation of the white 
man, an emancipation due to the awakening desire 



192 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

to abandon the established habits of fraud, and to 
place the elimination of the undesirable elements 
of the suffrage squarely and finally under the terms 
of law. The negro has, in the ultimate result, every- 
thing to gain from such a course. Temporarily he 
must suffer the consequences of an undemocratic 
adjustment to democratic conditions, an adjustment 
due primarily to no wilfulness of the white man at 
the South and to no apathy of the white man at 
the North, but to the contradiction presented by his 
presence in the Nation. There are always disad- 
vantages in securing for any adjustment a legal 
status through illegal means, and the direct elimi- 
nation of all the undesirable elements of voting age 
might have seemed a comparatively simple under- 
taking. Had the negro masses presented the only 
illiterate elements, that method might have been pur- 
sued. But there were two defective classes — the 
unqualified negroes of voting age and the unqualified 
white men. Both could not be dropped at once. A 
working constitution is not an a pi'iori theoretic crea- 
tion ; it must pass the people. The unqualified white 
men of voting age might be eliminated by gradual pro- 
cess, but they must first be included in the partnership 
of reorganization. Such a decision was a political 
necessity. They had been fused — by their participa- 
tion in the military struggle of the Confederacy and by 
their growing participation in the industrial and politi- 
cal power of the South — into the conscious and 
dominant life of the State. Many of them possessed 
large political experience and political faculties of an 
unusual order. Moreover — and we touch here upon 
a far-reaching consideration — no amended Constitu- 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 193 

tion, no suffrage reform, no legal status for a saner 
and purer political administration, was possible with- 
out their votes. They held the key to the political 
situation — with all its moral and social issues — and 
they demanded terms. 

Terms were given them.^ Under skilfully drawn 
provisions the mass of illiterate negro voters were 
deprived of suffrage and the then voting white popu- 
lation — with certain variously defined exceptions — 
was permitted to retain the ballot. Care was taken, 
however, that all the rising generation and all future 
generations of white voters should be constrained to 
accept the suffrage test, a test applicable, therefore, 
after a brief fixed period, to white and black alike. 
Such is the law.^ 

Lest, however, its technical and more strictly politi- 
cal provisions should be declared unconstitutional, its 
practical administration is placed in the charge of 
boards of registrars, having a large discretionary 
power in the application of the law, and thus — by the 

1 In Alabama the Democratic State Convention went so far as to 
pledge that no white man would be disfranchised " except for infa- 
mous crime." In criticism of this pledge the writer pointed out that 
its fulfilment would leave the ballot in the hands of all the white 
vagrancy, perjury, and bribery of the State — as these offences were not 
then " infamous" under the code ; and would be contrary to the per- 
manent interests of both races. The Constitutional Convention, largely 
at the suggestion of the Press Association of Alabama, practically ignored 
any literal interpretation of the unfortunate pledge, and the completed 
instrument did, in effect, result in the disfranchisement of a large num- 
ber of white voters. 

'^ No attempt is here made to distinguish between the suffrage pro- 
visions of the different States. A statement of these provisions in 
detail, together with a discussion of some of the current proposals of 
federal policy must be reserved for a later volume. 
o 



194 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

acceptance or rejection of candidates for registration 
— actually choosing and creating the permanent elec- 
torate of the State. A system of appeals has been pro- 
vided; and in a number of test cases white juries have 
shown themselves willing to reverse the adverse decision 
of the registrars, and to return a verdict in the interest 
of negro applicants ; but the system — as a system — 
is manifestly subject to grave abuses. If it be used 
as a responsible instrument for the fair and equitable 
administration of the law, it may prove an honorable 
and effective way out of an intolerable situation. 

The essential principles involved, apart from all 
the exasperations of the discussion that has gathered 
about the National Amendments are, however, but 
the elementary principles of experience itself. In an 
open letter to the Constitutional Convention of Ala- 
bama, they were thus expressed : — 

" Southern sentiment will not approve the disfran- 
chisement of the illiterate Confederate soldier. In any 
civilization, there is a deep and rightful regard for the 
man who has fought in the armies of the State. But, 
with that exception, the State must eventually protect 
itself, and protect the interests of both races, by the 
just application of the suffrage test to the white and 
black alike. The South must, of course, secure the 
supremacy of intelligence and property. This we shall 
not secure, however, if we begin with the bald dec- 
laration that the negro is to be refused the suffrage 
although he have both intelligence and property, and 
that the illiterate white man is to be accorded the 
suffrage although he have neither. Such a policy 
would, upon its face, sustain the charge that we are 
not really interested in the supremacy of intelligence 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 195 

and property, but solely in the selfish and oppressive 
supremacy of a particular race. 

" Such a course, through its depressing influence 
upon the educational and industrial ambitions of the 
negro, would but increase his idleness and lawless- 
ness, and work injustice to the negro and to the State. 
Take out of his life all incentive to the franchise, and 
you will partly destroy his interest in the acquisition 
of knowledge and of property, because no people 
will, in the long run, accept as a working principle of 
life the theory of taxation without representation. I 
do not think the negro will riot or rebel, but I do 
think he will be discouraged in the task of acquiring 
something for the State to tax. It is not merely a 
question of justice to the negro. It is a question of 
enlightened self-interest. No State can live and 
thrive under the incubus of an unambitious, unedu- 
cated, unindustrious, and non-property-holding popu- 
lation. Put the privilege of suffrage among the prizes 
of legitimate ambition, and you have blessed both the 
negro and the State. 

" If, on the other hand, we accept the administra- 
tion of an educational and property test which is to 
enfranchise the negro on his acceptance of its provi- 
sions, and is to enfranchise the white man whether he 
accepts them or not, we shall have adopted a measure 
which will be an injustice to the white citizenship of 
the South. It will be an injustice to the white man 
for the reason that it places for the negro a premium 
upon knowledge and property — makes for him a 
broader incentive to the acquisition of an education and 
a home, leaves the white boy without such incentive, 
makes the ballot as cheap in his hands as ignorance 



196 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

and idleness, and through indifference to the God- 
given relation between fitness and reward, tempts the 
race which is supreme to base its supremacy more 
and more upon force rather than upon merit. 

" No one shall justly accuse me of wanting to put 
the negro over the white man. If anything, however, 
could bring about that impossible result, it would be 
the imposition of a suffrage test for the negro without 
the application of the same test to the white man. 
Such action will increase for the negro the incentives 
to an education, to industry, and to good behavior ; 
and leave the white man without the spur of those 
incentives. Whatever such a course may be, in rela- 
tion to the humbler classes of our white people, it is 
not statesmanship. I do not assume that the average 
illiterate negro has the political capacity of the aver- 
age illiterate white man. The illiterate white man at 
the South has attained — through the genius of race 
and the training of generations — more political ca- 
pacity than many a literate negro. Nor is illiteracy 
a crime; but literacy is a duty. Old conditions are 
passing away. The white man of the future who 
would claim the political capacity to vote must exer- 
cise enough political capacity to quaUfy. The obhga- 
tion to qualify is an obligation of helpfulness. No 
one is a true friend to our white people who increases 
for the negro the encouragements and attractions of 
progress and refuses those incentives and encourage- 
ments to the children of the white man. I am quite 
sure that any suffrage test which establishes for the 
negro an incentive to education and property, and 
which makes the ballot in the hands of our white 
population as free as ignorance and thriftlessness, 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 197 

will serve, permanently, to injure the stronger race 
rather than the weaker. 

" To the white boy such a provision is an insult as 
well as an injustice, for the reason that it assumes his 
need of an adventitious advantage over the negro. 
For us to ask the negro boy to submit to a test which 
we are unwilling to apply to our own sons, would be, 
in my judgment, a reflection upon the capacity of our 
white population ; and our people, wherever it may 
be attempted by the politician of the hour, will come 
so to regard it. The absolute supremacy of intelli- 
gence and property, secured through a suffrage test 
that shall be evenly and equally applicable in theory 
and in fact to white and black — this will be the ulti- 
mate solution of the South for the whole vexed ques- 
tion of political privilege." ^ 

That this faith was not wholly justified by the issue 
of the Alabama Convention need not obscure the 
fact that the final proposals of the Convention were 
far more conservative, far more truly democratic, 
than at first seemed probable or possible. The 
"temporary plan" with its intended inequalities has 
already passed away. The permanent plan with its 
just and equal provisions is still, however, under the 
administration — as in Mississippi — of a system of 
election boards. 

If these boards of registrars — the essential and 
distinctive provision in the suffrage system of the 
South — be administered arbitrarily and unfairly, if 
they perpetuate the moral confusion and the debas- 
ing traditions which they were intended to supplant, 

1 From An Open Letter to the Constitutional Convention of Ala- 
l)ama, by Edgar Gardner Murphy, Montgomery, Ala., April, 1901. 



igS THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

then the South will stand condemned both to the 
world and to herself. She will have defeated the 
purpose of her own deepest political and moral 
forces. But let no one assume that such a result is 
now in evidence. There have been many instances 
of needless and intentional injustice. There are, 
upon the other hand, many evidences which indicate 
that while the old habits have widely affected the 
immediate action of the registrars, there is a growing 
disposition toward just administration, a disposition 
to exclude the unqualified white man and to admit 
the quahfied negro to the ballot.^ 

A dogmatic impatience will avail nothing. The 
Nation owes to the South an adequate opportunity 
for the trial of the difficult experiment which she has 
undertaken. Adequate results, a full determination 
of success or failure, cannot be attained in five years 
or in ten. All criticism of the actual political read- 
justment of the South should, moreover, be positive 
as well as negative, and adverse discussion should 
deal sympathetically and constructively with the 
question, " If not this, what .-' " What is the alterna- 
tive .'' One must recur again and again to the thought 

^ According to the Secretary of State for Mississippi more than 
15,000 negroes are already registered there as voters ; in Virginia the 
number registered is approximately 23,000; in South Carolina, 22,000; 
in Louisiana, 6400; in North Carolina, 6250. In the latter State, as 
well as in Alabama, many negroes have been discouraged from offering 
to register by reason of the fact that the State organization of the party 
with which they have been associated recently refused to admit even 
their most respected representatives to its Conventions. Large num- 
bers have also refrained from registration because of their unwilling- 
ness to meet the poll-tax requirement. The interest of the masses of 
the negroes in things political has, for quite different reasons, been 
much exaggerated by the representatives of both parties. 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 199 

that the fundamental embarrassments He in the ele- 
mentary conditions that precede all the evils and 
all the remedies. Partially anomalous remedies will 
always arise out of essentially anomalous conditions. 

The task is so complex, the difficulties are so 
inscrutably formidable, the issues — involving all the 
deepest and most fateful passions of races and parties 
— are so far-reaching, that one may well pause be- 
fore attempting prematurely to substitute for a pend- 
ing policy of extrication a policy — even though 
logically complete — which may be based upon more 
consistent but perhaps more academic conceptions of 
public right. As one who vigorously opposed the 
imposition of unequal or uneven tests the author feels 
that he may fitly say that there would be nothing 
gained and much lost by any return to older condi- 
tions, and that the whole Southern readjustment, 
whatever its theoretic inconsistencies, should be ac- 
corded a reasonable trial. 

The situation presents issues for which men upon 
either side have often been willing to die. But for 
strong men it is sometimes easier to die than to wait. 
The need of the present is not martyrdom, with all 
its touching and tragic splendor, but just a little 
patience. Human nature is everywhere essentially 
the same. No movement of our human life can long 
support its own momentum, or conserve its own in- 
tegrity, if it assume an irrational or unrighteous form. 
Political inequalities will not endure. With time, 
with reason, with patience, the moral forces of the 
South can accomplish something which all the enact- 
ments and threatening of the Nation can delay but 
cannot produce, — an equitable public temper, — with 



200 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

which imperfect laws are just, and without which 
Utopia itself would be but an institutional futility. 
God has left no corner of the world without certain 
of the resident forces of self-correction. The South 
feels, and feels justly, that in the view of history she 
has dealt as scrupulously as the North with the literal 
obhgations of the Constitution, and that in the travail 
of her extrication from an intolerable situation, her 
policy is now entitled to considerate and adequate 
trial. She has given her own welfare as hostage, in 
pledge for her sincerity. With patience, and with 
the rapidly increasing educational and industrial 
quickening of the South, there is arising within her 
popular life, a clearer outlook, a saner Americanism, 
a freer and juster civic sense — and these are, at 
last, the only ultimate security of our constitutional 
assumptions. 

The practical situation presents, not a problem of 
theoretic politics, sociology, or ethics. It is a problem 
of flesh and blood, the elements of which are men 
and women and little children ; the issues of which 
lie not in the cheap and passing advantage of factions 
and parties but in the happiness or the wretchedness 
of millions of our human kind. It is in many of its 
aspects the greatest, the most difficult, problem in 
American life — a problem all the greater because, 
North as well as South, the forces of race prejudice 
and of commercial and political self-absorption are 
constantly and impatiently putting it out of sight. But 
it is here. It is the problem of taking those institutions 
and those principles which are the flowering of the 
political consciousness of the most politically efficient 
of all the races of mankind — institutions and prin- 



VI THE SOUTH AND THE NEGRO 201 

ciples to which even the Anglo-Saxon is unequal save 
in theory — and securing the just coordination under 
them of this stronger race which has hardly tried 
them with a race which had never dreamed them — a 
race which, with all its virtues, is socially and politi- 
cally almost the least efficient of the families of men ; 
— two races separated socially by antipathies of 
blood, separated politically by the supposed division 
of political interests ; the weaker distrusting the 
stronger, the stronger distrusting the weaker ; each 
knowing the other at its worst rather than at its 
best, and each passionately resolved to be judged by 
its best rather than by its worst ; a situation of actual, 
grotesque, far-reaching inequalities projected under 
the conditions of a democratic order and continued 
under the industrial and pohtical assumption of the 
parity of classes. A great problem ! A problem 
demanding many things — the temper of justice, 
unselfishness, truth — but demanding most of all a 
patient wisdom, a wise, conserving, and healing 
patience — the patience of thought and of work; not 
the patience of the opportunist but the deeper patience 
of the patriot. Indeed, if one may speak of it with 
anything of hopefulness, it is only because this 
problem has now come for its adjustment into a day 
when a deeper sense of nationality has merged within 
its broader sympathies and its juster perspective the 
divisive standpoints of the past, bringing into the 
Nation's single and inclusive fate a new North as well 
as a new South, a South with its boundaries at the 
Lakes and the St. Lawrence, a North with its boun- 
daries through the fields and the pines of a reunited 
country at the waters of the Southern Gulf. 



A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 



CHAPTER VII 

A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 



A NARRATIVE of the general movement represented 
by the Southern Education Board and the General 
Education Board must be corrective before it can be 
descriptive. In phrases of loose and somewhat inac- 
curate reference, the reader of our current press has 
come to recognize it under such terms as " the 
Southern Conference Movement," "the Southern 
Educational Movement," "the Ogden Movement," 
and "the Conference for Education in the South." 
Of these terms only the last-named — " the Confer- 
ence for Education in the South " need here enter 
into the essential structure of the story. While the 
Southern and General Education Boards are distinct 
from each other, and are distinct from the Conference 
for Education in the South, there can be no history 
of the Boards without a preceding and accompanying 
history of the Conference. 

It was in the year 1897 that the Rev. Edward 
Abbott, D.D., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, made to 
Captain W. H. Sale of the Capon Springs Hotel, 
West Virginia, an informal suggestion of such a 
gathering. Dr. Abbott urged the advisability of 
holding at some point within the South a personal 
conference of men and women, Northern and South- 

205 



2o6 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

ern, who might be interested in the problems of 
Southern education. Captain Sale assented to the 
proposal and extended to those who might attend 
the hospitality of an attractive and historic inn. It 
was thought that such a meeting, comprising repre- 
sentatives both from the North and from the South, 
would be of service to the earnest educational forces 
of both sections — bringing to the South a clearer and 
juster perception of the motives and policies of the 
North, and bringing to the North a broader and more 
sympathetic appreciation of the needs and difficulties 
of the South. Much was expected from the oppor- 
tunity for personal association. Accordingly, ** the 
first Capon Springs Conference for Christian Educa- 
tion in the South assembled in the chapel on the 
grounds of the Capon Springs Hotel, on Wednesday, 
June 29, 1898, at 8.30 p.m. ; " ^ and its membership 
formed a small but interested company. 

The president of the first conference was the 
Rt. Rev. T. U. Dudley, LL.D., Bishop of Kentucky, 
an alumnus of the University of Virginia, late 
Chancellor of the University of the South at 
Sewanee, Tennessee. Its vice-president was the 
Hon. J. L. M. Curry, agent of the Peabody and 
Slater Boards ; its secretary and treasurer was the 
Rev. A. B. Hunter of St. Augustine's School, 
Raleigh, North Carolina. Upon its executive com- 
mittee were Dr. J. A. Quarles of Washington and 
Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, and the Hon. 
John Eaton, formerly United States Commissioner of 
Education. 

The Conference, though small in attendance, touched 

^ Proceedings of the First Capon Springs Conference, p. 3. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 207 

a note of reality which gave its work significance and 
made its existence permanent. Its continuous life 
was made possible largely through the broad sympa- 
thies and the executive effort of Dr. HoUis Burke 
Frissell, of Hampton, Virginia. The second Capon 
Springs Conference met on the 20th of June, 1899; 
and the third met — also at Capon Springs — on the 
27th of June, 1900. Of the second conference Dr. 
J. L. M. Curry was the president ; of the third, 
Mr. Robert C. Ogden of New York was president. 
Mr. Ogden, by the unanimous request of both the 
Southern and the Northern members; has from that 
time continued in service as the presiding officer.^ 

1 Among the men closely associated with the work of the Con- 
ference during the period of its sessions at Capon Springs, we find 
a number of representative names, in addition to those already men- 
tioned. Among the members from the North were Dr. James 
McAlister, president of the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia; William 
H. Baldwin, Jr., William J. Shieffelin, George Foster Peabody, George 
McAneny, R. Fulton Cutting, the Rev. David H. Greer, Charles E. Bige- 
low, Albert Shaw, and Everett P. Wheeler, of New York ; the Rev, 
A. D. Mayo, D.D., and General Guy V. Henry, of Washington ; the 
Rev. S. D, McConnell, of Brooklyn ; George S. Dickerman, of New 
Haven ; and Herbert Welsh of Philadelphia. 

Among the members from the South were Dr. Ormand Stone, 
Dr. A. H. Tuttle, and Dr. Charles W. Kent, professors in the Uni- 
versity of Virginia; Dr. A. K. Nelson and Dr. H. St. G. Tucker, 
professors in Washington and Lee University; Dr. Julius D. Dreher, 
president of Roanoke College; Dr. J. E. Gilbert of Washington, 
D.C.; Dr. Charles E. Meserve, president of Shaw University; the 
Rt. Rev. C. K. Nelson, D.D., Bishop of Georgia; the Rt. Rev. Howard 
E. Rondthaler of North Carolina ; Dr. F. G. Woodworth, of Tougaloo 
University, Mississippi ; Captain C. E. Vawter of Virginia ; Lyman 
Ward of Camp Hill, Alabama ; and — by no means least — the 
Hon. William L. Wilson, then president of Washington and Lee 
University. For a year as a member of its executive committee, and 
always as an interested and active participant, Mr. Wilson continued 



2o8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

Many of the papers and addresses of these early 
meetings are of permanent value. Dealing frankly 
and explicitly with almost every phase of the general 
subject of education — for both races — there is a 
definiteness of attack, a practicality of purpose, a 
generosity of temper, which made possible — and 
helpful — the expression of personal and sectional 
differences. These differences served but to illus- 
trate two truths — the truth that upon the larger 
number of cardinal issues there is, between North 
and South, more of agreement than of disagreement ; 
and the truth that the frank and courteous expres- 
sion of such differences as may remain serves only 
to create an atmosphere of mutual understanding 
which soon establishes the possibility of intelligent 
cooperation. If a literal and unvarying agreement 
were the sole condition of cooperation, cooperation — 
among the living forces in any department of activity 
— would be impossible. There can be little coopera- 
tion between those, upon either side, who know only 
their own opinions and can test that knowledge only 
in the light of their own experience ; there can be 
little cooperation between those who withhold or dis- 
guise what they really think. But between those who 
are ready to learn as well as to teach, and who sin- 
cerely attempt to throw into clear and ample light 
the landmarks of their respective positions, there is 
possible a common outlook and a common work. 

his association with the Conference until failing health forced him to 
retire from active public service. No man carried greater weight 
among his associates in these early and formative occasions. If 
Dr. Curry was the presiding genius, men like President Wilson, from 
the South, and Dr. Shaw and Mr. Ogden, from the North, were high 
among the counsellors. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 209 

Where, upon the other hand, there is mutual ig- 
norance, there is likely to be mutual suspicion. 
Where there is mutual knowledge, there may be 
something of disagreement, but there is sure to be 
more of confidence; and confidence rather than agree- 
ment is the essential basis of intelligent cooperation. 

Among the formal resolutions of the first Confer- 
ence were the following : — 

" Thoroughness in elementary instruction is of the 
first importance, and in facilitating the advance along 
higher lines the utmost care should be taken to allow 
no faster or further progress than is consistent with 
solid and durable foundations." 

" Longer school terms, and a longer school life, 
better qualified teachers and more thorough work, are 
greatly to be desired in the public schools. Indus- 
trial education is to be encouraged in all schools, and 
at least the elements of it in the public schools. 
While deprecating the unnecessary multiplication of 
rival institutions with high-sounding titles, we heartily 
believe that in a few institutions well equipped for it, 
provision should be made for the liberal or higher 
education of those called to leadership as preachers, 
teachers, editors, etc." 

"The principles now widely applied, tending to 
prevent the bestowal of gifts upon unworthy per- 
sons, have a proper field for exercise in the support 
of institutions of learning . . . and while fully realiz- 
ing the difficulties in the way of any such application 
of those principles, we are of the opinion that the 
gifts of the North in aid of the educational work of 
the South should proceed upon the lines of intelligent, 
equitable, and discriminate selection. ..." 
p 



2IO THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

" Upon the principle that if one member of the 
Union of States suffers, all the members suffer with 
it, the duty of the whole country to foster education 
in every part of it is manifest, and the question of a 
larger and more energetic national aid in behalf of 
efforts for the education of illiterate masses, deserves 
the most serious consideration of all patriotic citizens, 
and never more so than at the present time." 

It will be noted that this resolution is not, in a 
technical and explicit sense, an acceptance of the 
proposal of national aid as a formal element in the 
policy of the Conference ; but that suggestion is given 
a cordial measure of approval. In the third Confer- 
ence a more explicit declaration in favor of national 
aid was first accepted and then withdrawn. The 
proposal from that day forward has gained increasing 
consideration, and yet there has been much unwilling- 
ness to make the suggestion an explicit part of a for- 
mal programme. It has seemed right as well as wise 
that those who accept it and those who reject it should 
remain — without the introduction of a divisive issue 
— as colaborers in the immediate practical advance- 
ment of the general programme of educational revival. 

With the second Conference the word " Christian " 
was dropped from the titular description of the gath- 
ering. This change was probably the result, not of 
a desire to ignore any aspect of religious education, 
but in order that the supposedly "secular" depart- 
ment of " public " education might have appropriate 
and increasing recognition. The sessions of the Con- 
ference are still opened with prayer, and the coopera- 
tion of the leading representatives of denominational 
education has always been requested and accorded. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 211 

Among the resolutions of the second and third 
Conferences at Capon Springs, were expressions 
commending the idea of " the travelling library as 
especially applicable to conditions in the South," 
commending the administration of the Peabody and 
Slater Boards, suggesting a wiser discrimination in 
the use of money contributed at the North for negro 
education, advising the establishment of industrial 
reformatories for youthful incorrigibles, encouraging 
the development of secondary schools, and empha- 
sizing the importance of industrial education as a 
basis of cooperation between the sections (and pre- 
sumably between the races). The resolutions, as well 
as the papers and addresses, of the first three Con- 
ferences deal fully and freely with many of the inter- 
esting and appealing phases of negro education. 
All the more impressive, therefore, are the opening 
clauses of the first resolution of the second Confer- 
ence : " Resolved, that the education of the white 
race in the South is the pressing and imperative 
need, and the noble achievements of the Southern 
Commonwealths in the creation of common school 
systems for both races deserve not merely the sym- 
pathetic recognition of the country and of the world 
at large, but also give the old and high-spirited col- 
leges and universities of the South a strong claim 
upon a generous share of that stream of private 
wealth in the United States that is enriching and 
vitalizing the higher education of the North and 
West." 1 

Such a resolution is an explicit recognition not only 
of the importance of white education, its importance 

^ Proceedings of the Second Capun Springs Conference, p. 8. 



212 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

to the Nation, to the welfare of the negro, and to the 
white population of the South, but also a recognition 
of the nature of the claims for endowment which have 
often been made in behalf of certain of the institu- 
tions of higher learning in the Southern States. The 
"wealth" to which reference is made is not the 
wealth of the North, peculiarly, but the wealth " of 
the United States," South as well as North. The 
appeal to that wealth is not based upon a sense of 
unworthy poverty but upon the consciousness that the 
Southern institution — like the Western or the East- 
ern — has the power to serve, — to serve the whole 
Nation. Its service is all the more real if it stand 
and work where true work is hard, and if it minister, 
with inadequate equipment and under difficult condi- 
tions, to the reality of our culture and to the breadth 
and fulness of our national experience.^ 

When Harvard or Yale or Princeton University 
asks or receives a gift from a Southern man, the in- 

^ " Within the past five years the benefactions to the institutions of 
higher learning in the United States have amounted to a little more 
than ^61,000,000. Out of a total of $157,000,000 of productive funds 
held by American colleges the South has but $15,000,000. Out of 
the 8,500,000 books in college libraries the South holds but 1,250,000. 
The value of scientific apparatus in the South is a little over $1,000,000 
against a total valuation of $17,000,000 in the whole country. The valua- 
tion of buildings and grounds of Southern colleges is $8,500,000 in a total 
of$ 1 46,000,000. The total annual income available for higher education 
in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Missis- 
sippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky is $19,000 less than the 
yearly income of Harvard University. 

" Out of forty institutions in the United States with productive funds 
amounting to $1,000,000 or over, but five are in the South ; of twenty- 
one with productive funds of between $500,000 and $1,000,000 but one 
is in the South." From " Educational Endov\ ments of the South," by 
Elizabeth M. Howe ; The Popidai- Science .Monthly, October, 1903. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 213 

stitution is not said to have asked or received, in any 
political or sectional sense, " money from the South." 
Nor does a Southern institution, in asking or receiv- 
ing a gift from a Northern man, ask or receive, in 
any political or sectional sense, " money from the 
North." The South, like the West, is contributing 
to the prosperity of the country as a whole ; the 
South, like the West, may not improperly share in 
that prosperity. The man, however. North or South, 
who desires to add to the educational equipment with 
which the Nation is meeting anywhere the issues 
which involve the clearness of its thinking, the free- 
dom of its decisions, the wisdom and righteousness 
of its life, adds to that equipment, not as to a local or 
irrelevant memorial, but as to an expanding asset — 
to the informing and liberalizing equipment of his 
country and his age. 

It was at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that the 
Fourth Conference for Education in the South opened 
its sessions on the i8th day of April, 1901. The 
death of the kindly and courteous proprietor of the 
Capon Springs Hotel had suggested the advisability 
of holding the annual gatherings at other points 
within the Southern States. The striking develop- 
ment of educational interest in North Carolina gave 
especial appropriateness to the invitations from the 
city of Winston-Salem, and this session of the Con- 
ference marked the beginning of permanent and far- 
reaching changes in its policy and method.^ The 

^ Addresses of peculiar interest and value were made by the Hon. 
Charles B. Aycock, Governor of North Carolina ; Dr. G. S. Dicker- 
man of Connecticut ; Dr. Charles W. Dabney, president of the Univer- 
sity of Tennessee j Dr. James E. Russell, dean of the Teachers 



214 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

needs for specific work were set forth with such 
clearness and fulness, the interest of the representa- 
tives of the South and the North was so deeply- 
serious, the method of cooperation, after the past 
years of experiment, seemed to possess such genuine 
validity, the truly national significance of the whole 
subject seemed so increasingly evident, that there 
arose within the Conference a spontaneous demand 
for more effective organization. The cause seemed 
to be too great to be wholly left to the inspirational 
force of an annual meeting. There seemed to be a 
clear need for an executive body, a body which might 
give continuous and more general influence to the 
purposes and policies which the Conference had come 
to represent. The following resolutions, accompanied 
by their preamble, were unanimously adopted : — 

" The Conference for Education in the South, on 
the occasion of its fourth annual meeting, reaffirms 
its conviction that the overshadowing and supreme 
public need of our time, as we pass the threshold of 
a new century, is the education of the children of all 
the people. 

" We declare such education to be the foremost 
task of our statesmanship, and the most worthy object 
of philanthropy. With the expansion of our popula- 
tion and the growth of industry and economic re- 
sources, we recognize in a fitting and universal educa- 

College of New York ; Hon. G. R. Glenn, state superintendent of 
education for Georgia ; Dr. Truman J. Backus of Brooklyn, New York ; 
Dr. Charles D. Mclver, president of tlie State Normal College of North 
Carolina ; Dr. Francis G. Peabody and Dr. John Graham Brooks of 
Cambridge, Massachusetts ; Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York ; Mr. 
Carleton B. Gibson of Georgia ; and Dr. George T. Winston, presi- 
dent of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of North Carolina. 



Vll A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 215 

tion and training for the home, for the farm and the 
workshop, and for the exercise of the duties of citizen- 
ship, the only salvation for our American standards 
of family and social life and the only hope for the 
perpetuity of our institutions, founded by our fore- 
fathers on the four corner-stones of intelligence, 
virtue, economic efficiency, and capacity for political 
self-control. 

"We recognize the value of efforts hitherto made 
to solve our educational problems, both as respects 
the methods to be used, and also as regards the sheer 
quantity of work to be done. But we also find in 
the facts as presented at the sessions of this Con- 
ference the imperative need of renewed efforts on a 
larger scale ; and we find in the improved financial 
outlook of the country and in the advancing state of 
public opinion better hopes than ever before of a 
larger response to this greater need. 

" As the first great need of our people is adequate 
elementary instruction, and as this instruction must 
come to children so largely through mothers and 
women-teachers in their homes and primary schools, 
we desire to emphasize our belief in the wisdom of 
making the most liberal investments possible in the 
education of girls and women. 

" Whereas, therefore, the conditions existing in the 
Southern States seem now fully ripe for the large 
development as well as further improvement of the 
schools ; and, 

"Whereas, This Conference desires to associate 
itself actively with the work of organizing better 
school systems and extending their advantages to all 
the people : — 



21 6 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

" Resolved, that this Conference proceed to organ- 
ize by the appointment of an Executive Board of 
seven, who shall be fully authorized and empowered 
to conduct : — 

"I. A campaign of education for free schools for 
all the people, by supplying literature to the news- 
paper and periodical press, by participation in educa- 
tional meetings and by general correspondence ; and, 

" 2. To conduct a Bureau of Information and 
Advice on Legislation and School Organization. 

" For these purposes this Board is authorized to 
raise funds and disburse them, to employ a secretary or 
agent, and to do whatever may be necessary to carry 
out effectively these measures and others that may 
from time to time be found feasible and desirable." ^ 

The appointment of this executive body was as- 
signed as a duty to Mr. Robert C. Ogden, of New 
York, the presiding officer of the Conference, and — 
by special resolution — the president was made the 
eighth member of the Board. Mr. Ogden's broad 
appreciation of Southern educational conditions, his 
executive power, and his well-tried capacity for disin- 
terested and patriotic service, made his personal rela- 
tion to the Board an indispensable condition of its 
success. 

The president took no immediate action. It was 
only after several months of extended correspondence 
and of careful deliberation that he called together 
the following gentlemen : the Hon. J. L. M. Curry, 
agent of the Peabody and Slater Boards, Washing- 
ton, D.C. ; Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, formerly presi- 

^ Proceedings of the Fourth Conference for Education in the South, 
p. II. 



vil A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 217 

dent of the University of North Carolina and now 
president of Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisi- 
ana ; Dr. Wallace Buttrick of Albany, New York ; Dr. 
Charles W. Dabney, president of the University of 
Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee ; Dr. Hollis Burke 
Frissell, principal of Hampton Institute, Hampton, 
Virginia ; Mr. George Foster Peabody, a native of 
Georgia, now a citizen of Brooklyn, New York ; and 
Dr. Charles D. Mclver, president of the State Nor- 
mal College of North Carolina. These gentlemen, 
five from the South and three from the North, met 
for organization in the city of New York on Novem- 
ber 3, 1901. They added to their number Mr. Will- 
iam H. Baldwin, Jr., president of the Long Island 
R.R. ; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Re- 
vieivs ; Dr. Walter H. Page, editor of The World's 
Work ; and the Hon. H. H. Hanna of Indianapolis, 
Indiana. Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy of Montgom- 
ery, Alabama, was appointed as the executive secre- 
tary, associated with the president, and was later added 
to the membership of the Board as its active executive 
officer. Although not members of the Board, Dr. 
G. S. Dickerman of New Haven, Connecticut, and Dr. 
Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, were 
associated — as field agents — with its working force. 
Dr. Washington has been a wise counsellor in refer- 
ence to the educational problems affecting the colored 
people of the South, and Dr. Dickerman had served 
for two years with great acceptability as the special 
agent of the Conference. 

The Southern Education Board was organized with 
Robert C. Ogden as president, Charles D. Mclver 
as recording secretary, George Foster Peabody as 



2i8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

treasurer, and J. L. M. Curry as supervising direc- 
tor. The active work at the South was committed to 
a campaign committee altogether consisting of South- 
ern members and acting under the general direction 
of Dr. Curry. The Board had no funds to disburse. 
Its operating expenses for an experimental period of 
two years had been underwritten by one of its 
members. These expenses involved the inaugura- 
tion of a Bureau of Investigation and Publicity, at 
Knoxville, under the direction of Dr. Dabney, and 
the conduct of a general "campaign" in certain sec- 
tions of the South, where cooperation might be re- 
quested for the bettering of the public school facilities 
and for the enlargement of school appropriations. 
Shortly after the organization of the Southern 
Education Board, and largely as an additional result 
of the forces which had been called into existence by 
the Conference, there was also organized " the Gen- 
eral Education Board." Its chairman was Mr. 
William H. Baldwin, Jr., and among its members 
were Messrs. Curry, Ogden, Peabody, Buttrick, Shaw, 
and Page, of the Southern Board. In addition to 
these gentlemen, there were elected Mr. Frederick T. 
Gates, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mr. Morris 
K. Jesup, of New York, and Dr. Daniel C. Gilman, 
president of the Carnegie Institution. Dr. Wallace 
Buttrick became the secretary and executive officer, 
the Board was incorporated by special act of Con- 
gress, and permanent offices were opened at 54 
William St., New York City. 

The Southern Education Board, as has been ex- 
plained, makes no direct gifts to educational institu- 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 219 

tions. It exists to aid in the development and in the 
wise direction of educational sentiment. Though 
working at the South to secure larger poHcies of local 
support for popular education, and though working, 
North and South, to encourage larger policies of phi- 
lanthropy in relation to the educational needs of rural 
localities, it does not hold nor distribute funds for 
educational purposes. 

This is the work of the General Education Board, 
a body with three distinctive functions which may be 
thus defined : — 

(a) The careful investigation and the accurate col- 
lection and presentation of the facts as to the educa- 
tional situation at the South. I say the South, and 
yet the South is in no final or exclusive sense the 
one field of its interest. Wherever public education, 
as the chief constructive policy in American life, needs 
the support of exact inquiry and of intelligent and sym- 
pathetic interest, the General Education Board may find 
its work. The educational situation at the South, from 
causes both preceding and following the Civil War, 
claims at present the especial interest not merely of 
the Nation but of the world. To secure not only the 
statistics, but the facts back of the statistics, to appre- 
hend and truly to record the life which lies behind 
the formal phenomena of schoolhouses and school 
administration, to perceive just what the South has, 
in order rightly to understand just what the South 
needs — this is the work with which the General 
Education Board has thus far been primarily con- 
cerned. So fully has it had the intelligent and appre- 
ciative cooperation of the educational authorities of 
the South that its data from the State of Mississippi 



220 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

(for example) form a more comprehensive collection 
than any body of reports to be found in Mississippi. 
What is true of this State is true of others. Such 
results have necessarily been dependent, in large 
degree, upon the aid of the officials and teachers of 
the South. The Board may be of service to them 
only because it has been served by them. 

{b) In addition to the work of investigation, the 
Board is also committed — subject to the discretion of 
its authorities and the limit of its resources — to a 
policy of assistance. This policy represents in its 
purpose no mere effort of the wealth of one section 
to meet the needs of another section. The Board 
was organized under Act of the National Congress in 
order that the sources of its support might become 
as broadly national as its interests, might be found in 
the wealth of the South as well as in the wealth of 
the North and East and West. Nor have the gifts 
of the General Education Board represented a sub- 
stitute for local effort. They have represented an 
answer to it. They have not forestalled initiative. 
They have asked it. Their gifts have been so tendered 
as to awaken and stimulate those forces of self-help 
which form the amplest security of public invest- 
ments. The resources of the Board have been too 
limited, moreover, for any policy of general aid. They 
have permitted, however, certain small conditional 
appropriations to well-accredited institutions of both 
races v/ithin the South. Especially in Georgia, Ala- 
bama, North Carolina, and Tennessee, these gifts 
have served as an indication of the spirit, and as an 
earnest of the sympathetic and inclusive purpose of 
the organization. With increasing means, this work 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 221 

may be done with broader power and more far-reach- 
ing benefit. 

(c) No limitation of means has served, however, to 
arrest the work which many have regarded as of 
more preUminary importance than the gifts of aid. 
This has been the conduct of certain phases of coop- 
erative experiment, in order to determine just how 
the influences represented by the Board and the influ- 
ences represented in the South may most wisely join 
their forces. At one point, a rural county having a 
short school term has been enabled to lengthen its 
school period at one end of the year upon condition 
that the county from its own resources would add a 
month at the other end. At another point a model 
country school has been established, with its "teach- 
erage " and its school farm ; at a number of the State 
Universities of the South, such as the University of 
Tennessee, the University of Georgia, the University 
of North Carolina, the University of Mississippi, and 
the University of Virginia, assistance has been given 
in the conduct of " Summer Schools " for teachers. 
There is an indication of the moral earnestness of the 
teaching force of the South in the mere recital of the 
fact that in the summer of 1903 more than ten thou- 
sand of these young men and women thus gave their 
vacation period to the work of securing a broader 
and fuller equipment for their profession. For two 
summers in succession more than two thousand have 
gathered at one university alone — the University of 
Tennessee. 

Perhaps, however, the most striking of the cooper- 
ative experiments of the General Education Board is 
to be found in the series of personal conferences 



222 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

between the representatives of the Board and the 
county superintendents of education. In ten of the 
Southern States these conferences have thus far been 
held; and the States which have not yet been visited 
have taken the initiative in requesting them. Coming 
to an accessible common point within the State, the 
superintendents of education from the several counties 
have met with the representatives of the Board in 
frank and cordial interchange of information and 
ideas. Elaborate bulletins of data from each county 
have been filled out, signed, and filed. The vivid 
interests and forces which can never be crowded into 
"reports" have come naturally and rightly to the 
surface; misunderstandings have been adjusted, 
misinformation has been corrected, and in the com- 
mon and supreme concern for the life and training of 
the child, the representatives of every phase of feeling 
and opinion have found the deep and serious basis of 
cooperation. Thus in contact with men coming 
directly from the people, the authorities of the Board 
have sought that fulness and freedom of information 
which might place its policies and its activities in 
close and helpful touch with the actual South. The 
Board, in every Southern State, has been accorded the 
interest and aid of the State Department of Education. 
Thus, through the gathering and classifying of 
information, through the extension of aid under the 
form of conditional appropriations to certain selected 
educational institutions, and through the effort to 
bring its policies into intelligent and practical relation 
with the real working forces of the South, the 
General Education Board has attempted, and has 
made, what may be called a demonstration of method. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 223 

It has established a working basis not only for its own 
activities but for the activities of others. The 
resources of philanthropy, however large or however 
varied, whether representing the wealth of the North 
or of the South, may find in its large experience and 
its ample records a helpful if not an authoritative 
measure of information and suggestion. Its files are 
not for any self-interested or private use. Its facili- 
ties and its reports are at the service of the pubHc. 

The Southern Education Board, as already stated, 
has found its distinctive service in the deepening and 
quickening of educational sentiment within the South. 
Its work has not been that of employing the resources 
of philanthropy. It has been the task of directly 
appealing to the resources of taxation, to those local 
forces of self-interest and self-development by which 
the State expends a Httle money for a larger life and 
through which the community builds the schoolhouse 
as the temple of its own consecration to the joy, the 
usefulness, and the liberties of its children. 

No work for the future of the South can be con- 
ducted in forgetfulness of what the South has done. 
The nature of her progress, when considered in rela- 
tion to her difficulties, must bring a sense of gratitude 
to the true citizen of the Nation, whether he be 
Southerner or Northerner. And yet no true work 
for the future can find the goal of its attainment in 
the memory of the past or in the mere consideration 
of the present. There remains how much to do ! 
The task of the South must still bring for many a 
year a searching test to her patience, her generosity, 
her wisdom. To help directly with this task ; to 



224 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

increase in the treasury of her local heart the South's 
best capital of enterprise, — her fund of interest, of 
sane and well-measured self-command, of civic hope, 
of true yet unstrident confidence in herself, her 
children, her resources, and her future ; to stand for 
a patriotism which is not merely retrospective but 
constructive, — this, as many have conceived it, is 
the broader service of the Southern Education Board. 

It is a work to which thousands of men and women 
have long given themselves. For this Board does 
not assume that it has created the educational revival 
at the South. Its work is but a part of that revival 
— has advanced it and has been advanced by it. 
Within an enlarging confederacy of local interests 
and local forces, it has served to commend and to 
reenforce the responsibility of the people for the 
education of all the people, thus taking its vigorous 
part in the creation of an educational sentiment which 
may answer the gifts of philanthropy with the larger 
gifts of taxation, and which — with or without phi- 
lanthropy — may provide for the children of the State 
a longer school term and a better school equipment. 

Its bureau of publication has circulated the litera- 
ture of the subject. Through circulars and special 
bulletins the press of the South has been freely in- 
formed as to educational needs and helpful educa- 
tional methods. Under the auspices of the Board, or 
in cooperation with the local authorities, hundreds of 
public meetings have been organized, and eager audi- 
ences, sometimes in the towns, sometimes in the 
country, have been addressed by trusted and effective 
speakers. Its Southern representatives have entered 
vigorously and untiringly into the definite campaign 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 225 

to secure a larger measure of local taxation for the 
public schools ; and, in the State of North Carolina, 
where, under Dr. Mclver and his associates, this work 
has been most successfully conducted, there are now in 
one county more " local-tax districts" (school districts 
in which the additional tax for schools has been voted 
by the people) than existed in the whole State prior to 
the activity of the Board. In 1902, North Carolina 
had 56 local tax communities; in January of 1904 there 
were 186, with an anticipated additional increase of 
nearly 100 within the next half year. In other South- 
ern States similar work has been accomplished. It 
cannot be said that the results attained are wholly due 
to this Board alone. Its part in this work, however, 
has been conspicuous, and, at many points, decisive. 

For their popular interpretation, both the General 
Education Board and the Southern Education Board 
are still much indebted to the Conference for Educa- 
tion in the South. The existence of the Boards has 
not made the Conference obsolete. Its annual ses- 
sions have grown both in numbers and in popular 
authority. It still brings together the interested and 
representative forces of all sections. It still makes 
from its platform a palpable and inspiring demonstra- 
tion of cooperative statesmanship, speakers from the 
North and from the South dealing in candor and fra- 
ternity, with those industrial, social, or political con- 
ditions which retard or advance the popular develop- 
ment of the educated life. The fifth Conference, by 
special invitation of the legislature of the State, 
gathered at Athens, the home of the University of 
Georgia, April 24, 1902. The sixth Conference, by 

Q 



226 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

invitation of the Governor, the legislature, the Uni- 
versity of Virginia, and the educational forces of the 
State, met at Richmond, Virginia, on April 22, 1903. 
Of the deep enthusiasm of the crowded audiences 
at both these Conferences one may not write at 
length. Nor is it possible to dwell upon any of the 
interesting details of what were, in fact, memorable 
occasions.^ 

II 

Through these annual Conferences as well as 
through the printed issues and the pubhc declara- 
tions of the members of the Southern and General 
Education Boards, the educational situation at the 
South has been brought more clearly and more 

1 Among those in attendance at one or the other of these later 
meetings, many of the spealcers being present at both, were the Gov- 
ernor of Virginia, the Governor of North Carolina, the State superin- 
tendents of education from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, 
Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and 
Texas ; John W. Abercrombie, president of the University of Ala- 
bama ; J. H. Kirkland, president of Vanderbilt University ; F. P. 
Venable, president of the University of North Carolina ; B. C. Cald- 
well, president of the State Normal College of Louisiana ; B. L. Wig- 
gins, chancellor of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee ; 
Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution ; John B. Knox and 
Sydney J. Bowie of Alabama ; Hoke Smith of Georgia ; Hamilton 
W. Mabie, associate editor of the Outlook, New York ; Richard 
Watson Gilder, editor of the Century, New York ; L. H. Bailey, pro- 
fessor in Cornell University, Ithaca, New York ; Dr. Felix Adler, New 
York ; Dr. Richard S. Jesse, president of the University of Missouri ; 
R. Fulton Cutting of New York ; Josephus Daniels of North Caro- 
lina ; Walter B. Hill, chancellor of the University of Georgia ; W. 
W. Stetson, state superintendent of public instruction for Maine; R. 
Heath Dabney, Paul B. Barringer, and Charles W. Kent, professors in 
the University of Virginia, Dr. W. T. Harris, U. S. Commissioner of 
Education, and others who have been named in reference to their 
connection with the earlier Conferences. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 227 

fully into the national consciousness. The intelli- 
gent forces of American opinion have been won 
to a fairer appreciation of Southern difficulties. The 
revelation of Southern needs has brought into only 
more evident relief the abundant heroism of those 
human forces with which the South is responding to 
her task. In proportion to her means the South is 
perhaps expending as much for public education, per 
capita of her children of school age, as States like 
Michigan in the West or New York in the East.^ Yet 
those whose burdens are abnormal need the expendi- 
ture of more than normal power, and those whose edu- 
cational progress has been so long and so unhappily 
retarded — and yet whose populations are constantly 
in competition with the more generally educated 
masses of other sections — can equalize the condi- 
tions of competition only by increasing the volume 
of expenditure. The man who is toward the rear in 
the march of progress will never get to the front 
simply by moving as fast as the others move. If he 
is to get to the front, he must expend sufficient energy 

1 The amount raised for public education per capita of the school 
population, is ^22. 37 in Massachusetts and ^20.88 in New York, as 
contrasted with $2.87 in Tennessee and ^2.28 in North Carolina ; but, 
according to Dr. Charles W. Dabney, back of each child in Tennessee 
there is only $509 of taxable property, and in North Carolina only 
^337, as contrasted with $1996 in Michigan and $2661 in New York. 
(See Report of the Sixth Conference for Education in the South, p. 40.) 
We may note also that in the Northern and Western States the propor- 
tion of adult males to the children of school age is from 50 to 100 per 
cent greater than at the South. (See the Appendix to this volume, 
p. 304, Table VII, columns 8 and 13.) The male producer at the South 
may thus be called upon to bear a larger economic burden, under the 
system of public education, than a like producer at the North. This 
burden is still further distributed at the North by the much larger num- 
ber of women engaged in the higher productive employments. 



228 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



to move as fast as the others move, plus the energy 
which must be expended to bring him from the rear 
to the front. The South is finding her duty, there- 
fore, not merely in the measure of her resources but 
in the appalling measure of her needs. 

Let us turn again, therefore, to a brief statement 
of her educational situation. I quote from Dr. Charles 
W. Dabney, president of the University of Tennes- 
see. " Our Southern problem," says Dr. Dabney, 
" is the education of all the people of the South. 
First, who are these people.'' In 1900 the States 
south of the Potomac and east of the Mississippi con- 
tained, in round numbers, 16,400,000 people, 10,400,000 
of them white and 6,000,000 black. In these States 
there are 3,981,000 white and 2,420,000 colored chil- 
dren of school age (five to twenty years), a total of 
6,401,000. They are distributed among the States as 
follows : — 





White 


Colored 


Total 


Virginia 


436,000 


269,000 


705,000 


West Virginia 










342,000 


15,000 


357,000 


North Carolina 










491,000 


263,000 


754,000 


South Carolina 










218,000 


342,000 


560,000 


Georgia . 










458,000 


428,000 


886,000 


Florida . . 










110,000 


87,000 


197,000 


Alabama . . 










390,000 


340,000 


730,000 


Mississippi . 










253,000 


380,000 


633,000 


Tennessee . 










590,000 


191,000 


781,000 


Kentucky 










693,000 
3,981,000 


105,000 


798,000 


Totals 1 


2,420,000 


6,401,000 



^ To these totals might well be added the children of school age in 
Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Arkansas has 380,815 white, 148,534 
colored ; Louisiana 276,563 white, 261,453 colored ; Texas 955,906 
white, 259,491 colored. 



vii A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 229 

" What an army of young people to be educated ! 
How they are marching on ! Many of them are al- 
ready beyond our help ; all will be in less than ten 
years; and still they come marching up from the 
cradles into American citizenship. 

" The important question is, What are we in the 
South doing for these children ? Let us see. Only 
60 per cent of them were enrolled in the schools in 
1900. The average daily attendance was only 70 per 
cent of those enrolled. Only 42 per cent aj'e actitally 
at school. One-half of the negroes get no schooling 
whatever. One white child in five is left wholly 
illiterate. Careful analysis of the reports of State 
superintendents showing the attendance by grades, 
indicates that the average child, whites and blacks 
together, who attends school at all stops with the 
third grade. 

" In North Carolina the average citizen gets only 
2.6 years, in South Carolina, 2.5 years, in Alabama, 
2.4 years of schooling, both private and public. In 
the whole South the average citizen gets only three 
years of schooling of all kinds in his entire life ; and 
what schooling it is ! This is the way we are educat- 
ing these citizens of the Republic, the voters who will 
have to determine the destinies not only of this peo- 
ple but of millions of others beyond the seas. 

" But why is it that the children get so little educa- 
tion ."^ Have we no schools in the country .-' Yes, 
but what kind of schools .-' The average value of a 
school property in North Carolina is $180, in South 
Carolina, $178, in Georgia, ^523, and in Alabama, 
$512. The average monthly salary of a teacher in 
North Carolina is $23.36, in South CaroHna, $23.20, 



230 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

in Georgia, $27, and in Alabama, $27.50. The schools 
have been open in North Carolina an average of only 
70.8 days in the whole year, in South CaroHna, 88.4, 
in Georgia, 112, and in Alabama, 78.3. The average 
expenditure per pupil in average attendance has been, 
in North Carolina $4.34, in South Carolina $4.44, in 
Georgia $6.64, and in Alabama about $4.00 per an- 
num. [I am glad to say that these per capita ex- 
penditures are now a little larger and the school 
terms a little longer than when this statement was 
made.] In other words, in these States, in school- 
houses costing an average of $276 each, under teach- 
ers receiving an average salary of 1^25 a month, we 
have been giving the children in actual attendance 
five cents' worth of education a day for ?>y days only 
in the year. This is the way we have been schooling 
the children." ^ 

The reading of Dr. Dabney's figures is not a cheer- 
ing diversion. And yet it were folly to assume that 
we can aid the South by the exercise of a blind affec- 
tion which would blink or conceal the facts. These 
facts are not taken from the tale of an enemy ; they 
are taken from the reports of our own superintend- 
ents of public instruction, they form a part of our 
local as well as our national records. The first duty 
of the physician who would apply a remedy Hes in a 
sympathetic, but fearless diagnosis. The first duty 
of a wise educational statesmanship is a clear and 
unflinching perception of the situation. There is no 
disgrace in our illiteracy. It is due to historic and 
formidable forces. There would be every disgrace, 

1 See also Report of the Proceedings of the Sixth Conference for 
Education in the South, 1903, p. 37. 



vn A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 231 

however, in a policy which would now perpetuate it 
by concealment, and which would feed its indifference 
upon the husks of a flattering and senseless optimism. 

It has been said that we must educate. When we 
say " we," it is evident that we must count all of our 
people within the fellowship of responsibility. Within 
the partnership of obligation, the great masses of our 
white people should hold the first place of initiative, 
dignity, and service. No man can go to them with 
"alms." To rouse them to see their duty, their duty 
to their children, to themselves, and to their country, 
and then to help them see how bravely and how well 
they themselves can perform this duty — we have 
here the fundamental and distinctive element in the 
policy of the Southern Board. 

But the principle of initiative may well be supple- 
mented by the principle of cooperation. It is an 
established principle in every form of commercial, 
religious, or educational effort. No man, North or 
South, shares any privilege of this life for which 
he has paid all the cost. How many of us who go 
to church have paid our full share of the cost of 
what we get ? How many men in business refuse 
to be benefited by policies and facilities of the com- 
munity which, in their value, are out of all proportion 
to what these men have paid .'' Who goes to a col- 
lege North or South and really pays there, in full, 
for all he gets .'' He may pay what is asked or 
charged, but what is asked or charged is a small 
element of the cost of what he gets. The man 
who goes to Yale or Harvard University, the young 
woman who goes to Vassar, is directly the beneficiary 
of buildings and endowments which philanthropy has 



232 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

given and which express the enduring truth that 
the education of our children, whether the children 
of the rich or of the poor, represents a great task 
of collective consecration, the task of society and of 
humanity. 

Who shall presume, therefore, to assert that the 
principle of cooperation may be accepted by the 
sons of wealth, but that it may not be accepted by 
the children of the poor ? Surely, if any children in 
our land may lay rightful and honorable claim upon 
the generous interest of all our countrymen, these 
are the children of our rural South. The children of 
a people isolated from the busy life of trade, often 
thinly settled upon undeveloped lands, they yet repre- 
sent an uncorrupted stock, full of native vigor and 
native wit. It is a noble wealth which awaits us in 
their capacities and faculties. The South's intense 
preoccupation with the problem of the negro has 
largely shut these people out from the care and the 
provisions of the State. For this preoccupation and 
for all its unfortunate results, our whole country has 
been responsible. 

The Federal Government freed the slaves, but the 
Federal Government spent little indeed in fitting 
them to use their freedom well. Hundreds of thou- 
sands of ignorant negro men were introduced to the 
suffrage without any introduction into the capacity 
for its exercise, and the South, — defeated, impover- 
ished, desolate, — was forced to assume the task of 
providing for the education of two populations out 
of the poverty of one. 

The very hypothesis of intervention on behalf of 
the negro, as has also been previously suggested. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 233 

was that the condition of the black man was the 
care and responsibility, not of a section, but of the 
whole country. The very essence of the theory 
of emancipation was that the status of the black 
man was the charge of the Nation. Yet the issue 
of emancipation left the negro, in his helplessness, 
at the threshold of the South. The South, with 
peculiar heroism, has risen to that responsibility. For 
one dollar contributed for his education by philan- 
thropy from the North, four dollars have been con- 
tributed through taxation from the South. The negro 
has shared this burden, but his vast numbers, his 
great needs, and his low productive capacity have 
necessarily reduced the amount which the South 
could expend upon her white children. 

The utter impossibility, to the impoverished South, 
of speedily securing the negro's educational develop- 
ment, made the thought of his political power an all- 
absorbing anxiety. From this preoccupation of our 
public interest (largely caused, as I have said, by the 
neglect of the freedmen by the Federal Government) 
the chief sufferers were the white children of the 
masses of our rural population. That they have so 
suffered may be called the fault of the South ; yet it 
is also the fault of that negligence of all our coun- 
trymen through which the South with inadequate 
resources has been largely left to bear alone a 
national burden and to discharge a national responsi- 
bility. When, therefore, the wealth of our common 
country, North or South, generously invests its reve- 
nues in the education of the children of these Southern 
States, I do not call it the extension of " charity " ; 
I venture to call it the acceptance of obligation. 



234 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

This is the obUgation which was so nobly assumed 
by the founder of the Peabody Fund, — a fund left 
by a Northern man for the educational needs of 
white and black, a fund which has for these thirty 
years — through the South's glad and faithful use of 
it — put forever beyond question not only the accept- 
ability of educational philanthropy at the South, but 
the practical wisdom of the comprehensive policy for 
which it stands. 

There are many who see, therefore, in this educa- 
tional situation at the South a challenge to the wisest 
and deepest forces of a national patriotism. This, 
however, is no mere question of the duty of the 
North to the South. A similar situation in New 
England or the West should arouse a hke response 
from South as well as North. It is a question of the 
duty of the Nation to the children of the Nation. Our 
conditions, as I have said, are those of a rural popula- 
tion thinly settled upon undeveloped lands. May I 
again recall some of the peculiar phenomena of its 
distribution ? 

" Let us turn to the figures of the last census. 
The one State of Massachusetts, as we have seen, 
has 20 cities of over 25,000 inhabitants. The 10 
States south of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, 
with an area 85 times as great have only 19, and the 
aggregate population of the Massachusetts cities ex- 
ceeds that of the latter by 417,000. 

"Again, Massachusetts has no communities of 
over 4000 inhabitants, with an aggregate population 
of 2,437,994. Her entire population is 2,805,346, so 
that the number in smaller places is but 366,352. 

"These 10 Southern States have altogether only 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 235 

146 communities of this rank, with an aggregate 
population of 2,148,262. But the total population 
of these 10 States is 17,121,481, so that the number 
dwelling in places smaller than towns of 4000 inhabit- 
ants is 14,972,738, as contrasted with 366,352. 

"By comparison with the census of 1890 we may 
see the trend of population. During the ten years 
from 1890 to 1900 the population of Massachusetts 
increased 566,399, and the increase in her no large 
places was 551,555- Ii'^ the 10 Southern States, the 
total increase was 3,071,276, of which only 505,781 
was in their 146 cities. 

" Outside of the larger places Massachusetts in- 
creased only 14,844; these 10 States of the South 
increased their population outside of their cities of 
this size, by 2,565,495. Massachusetts people live 
in cities and the growth is there. Southern people 
live in the country and are to do so in the future. 
Only a small part live in communities of even 1000 
inhabitants. The 608 places of this size or larger 
contain but 3,029,000, while 14,090,000 remain for 
the strictly rural population. This is for the 10 
most southern States. If we add Maryland, Vir- 
ginia, and Kentucky, the number will rise to over 
17,000,000. How many people has Massachusetts 
or Rhode Island in communities of less than 1000 
inhabitants ? So few as to be hardly appreciable as 
an influence in their educational policy. 

" Now it is a serious question in the North, how to 
provide good schools for the country. Even in 
Massachusetts there are many little places where 
educational opportunities are by no means of a high 
order. Else why has Berkshire County 415 native 



236 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

white illiterate men of over twenty-one years of age ? 
One county in northern Maine has over 15 per cent of 
its native white voters who cannot read and write. 
New England has not yet answered in her own 
domain the question of education for her rural peo- 
ple. But in the South this is the main question. 
Southern cities, like Northern cities, have institutions 
which are their pride ; but the cities are few in the 
South and play a subordinate part. The multitudes 
of people are widely scattered. The neglected few 
in Massachusetts or Maine multiply into millions. 
To make the situation harder, the South has the two 
races to complicate everything, two peoples so unlike 
yet bound together in so many of their interests. 

" The Nation has yet to open its eyes to the possi- 
bilities lying dormant in these great Southern States 
— 17,000,000 people in these stretches of territory, 
none of whom live in a village of 1000 inhabitants ! 
Ten million whites of our native American stock, 
with few exceptions, and having 3,500,000 children 
of school age usually unprovided with good schools ! 
Seven million negroes, with 2,500,000 children, and 
these vitally identified in their rise or deterioration 
with the whites about them ! Who grasps the scope 
of these figures, and comprehends the task of the 
men who have to wrestle with these problems ? Do 
they deserve no recognition from the Nation .-* Can 
the Nation in a prudent regard for its own per- 
manence and future growth afford to go on heedless 
of what is done or not done in this great section of 
our territorial domain ? 

" There is no end of the bounty bestowed on insti- 
tutions for the common people in Northern cities. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 237 

Why, as an American, should I be more interested 
in the children of Boston or of New Haven than in 
those of the Carolinas and Georgia ? Who are the 
children of Boston ? Sixty-seven per cent of them 
are of parentage from beyond the sea. Eighty per 
cent of the children of New York are of such parent- 
age, and the story is the same for other great cities — 
Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco. More than three- 
quarters of their people are of foreign antecedents : 
Irish, Germans, French, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, 
Russians, Armenians, Chinese. 

" Not that I would disparage the beneficent minis- 
tries of education for any of these. It is all an occa- 
sion of joy. I only speak of what we are doing for 
them to emphasize what we ought to do for those of 
our own blood. It was the apostle to the Gentiles, 
engaged with all his might in efforts for the people 
of other races, who wrote : ' If any provideth not for 
his own, and especially his own household, he hath 
denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.' And 
so, to-day, our interest in other people should deepen 
our sense of responsibility for those who are our near- 
est of kin. 

" Who are these 10,000,000 whites of the South ? 
They are the children of the colonial pioneers, of the 
soldiers who made the continental army, of the fathers 
who established the Republic. They are many of 
them descendants from a New England ancestry as 
well as from settlers of Virginia and the Carolinas. 
A cursory study of the subject leads me to believe 
that in some counties of Georgia a larger proportion 
of the people can trace back through some line to a 
New England sire than in the city of Boston. The 



238 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

cracker is of the same blood with the merchant prince. 
This is to be seen in their very names. The people, 
North and South, are one, in features and in native 
force, cherishing common religious beliefs and con- 
serving the immemorial traditions of freedom and 
independence. 

" What is due from the prosperity of the great 
cities of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania 
to their kinsfolk in the rural South ? This is only a 
new direction to a very old question. For a full hun- 
dred years these cities have generously recognized 
their obligations to their own children as they went 
to Ohio, Michigan, and all the region beyond to the 
Pacific Coast. What academy or college was planted 
anywhere in these states during their pioneer days 
that was not helped from the older and wealthier 
communities of the East ? We see the results to-day 
in the whole Hfe of the Northwest." ^ 

Our Southern States must look with "larger and 
more active confidence to the resources of local taxa- 
tion, and yet the conditions which have been here 
outlined possess indeed a national significance and 
should challenge a national response. The child in 
Alabama is not the child of Alabama alone. Our 
children — let me again suggest — are the Nation's 
children. In their potential citizenship lie the social 
and political forces which are to have a part in the 
making of their country's government, in the shaping 
of their country's destiny. Yet there is reason for 

^ Quoted from George S. Dickerman, New Haven, Connecticut, — 
one of the wisest and most conservative of the Northern students of 
Southern conditions. Further statistics as to the density and the dis- 
tribution of population will be found in Table VH of the Appendix, 
p. 304, columns 2 and 3. 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 239 

reflection in a startling contrast to which the records 
of our government will point us. The child of Alaska 
is the subject of the Nation's considerate provision. 
He is not in any immediate sense a potential voter. 
Yet in Alaska the expenditure upon the children of 
the Nation — though 60 per cent of them are the 
children of the Eskimo — is annually $17.78 per 
capita of the enrolment. The children of Alabama 
are not the subject of a national provision, and the 
expenditure in Alabama per capita of the pupils in 
average attendance is now annually $4.41. For the 
child of the Nation in Alaska an annual investment 
of $17.78, actually paid in part, though indirectly, 
by the people of Alabama; — for the child of the 
Nation in Alabama an annual investment of $4.41 — 
though the child of Alabama represents in his grow- 
ing and eager life the potential electorate of the 
richest and noblest land in history. 

We may well be grateful for every dollar that is 
being expended upon the children of our territories. 
I also know the explanations with which some would 
attempt to modify the appalling contrast which I 
have cited. But when we see what our great gov- 
ernment can spend and what this government can 
compass when it tries, how insistently and success- 
fully it can find needs to meet and tasks to accom- 
plish from the Eskimo to the Filipino, and from Porto 
Rico to Guam, has not the time fully come to look 
straight and clear before us to the home acre of our 
own undeveloped citizenship .'' It is well to aid and 
to bless the governed. We shall not fail to do so if 
we have something of a care for those who are going 
to do the governing. No rule will ever be wiser than 



240 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the rulers, and no republic can be freer than its own 
people. To enlarge the lot and to increase the inspira- 
tions of the children of these United States, North 
and South and East and West, is, therefore, not a 
gratuitous charity : it is not merely the obligation of 
one section to another ; it is the responsibility of the 
Nation to its world-influence as well as to its citizen- 
ship ; it is the supreme duty of our national capacities 
and of our national self-interest. 

There have been objections to any policy of "fed- 
eral aid." Unquestionably such a policy might take 
objectionable forms. With, however, the safeguard- 
ing of the principle of self-help and with a broad and 
satisfactory recognition of the principle of local 
administration, such a policy would seem to be as 
commendable as it would be effective. Nor should 
such a policy rest upon the merely local or sectional 
necessities of the South ; it should be national in 
its whole conception. Representing a constructive 
policy of the State, it should be available throughout 
our country wherever the illiteracy of the individual 
county rises beyond a fixed percentage ; — wherever, 
in other words, the standard of American citizenship 
is threatened by the unusual massing of ignorant or 
untutored life. 

And yet it should not be a policy of constraint. 
Federal assistance should not be forced upon the un- 
willing, for under such conditions the county would 
certainly be averse to the acceptance of the necessary 
terms of aid, and the appropriation — when given — 
would not receive sympathetic or effective adminis- 
tration. But where the county, through its own peo- 
ple or its own authorities, makes request, and where 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 241 

the county meets the conditions of self-help, the gen- 
eral government should be free to extend its practical 
cooperation. The labor of the schools is labor for a 
citizenship which is national as well as local. Igno- 
rance in America cannot be fenced off into negligible 
provinces of life and interest. Though the Nation 
neglect its ignorance, ignorance will not neglect the 
Nation. It thinks, it hates, it drags down — by crude 
and wasteful work — the standard of intelligent and 
effective labor ; ignorance helps to make others igno- 
rant, its poverty helps to make others poor ; it votes ; 
and, because it votes, it creates the perennial oppor- 
tunity of the demagogue and an ever attendant peril 
of the State. There are in the United States to-day 
more than 6,000,000 of people who cannot read and 
write, among them nearly 2,300,000 of illiterate men 
of voting age, and, sadder still, more than 2,600,000 
of illiterate adult women — possible mothers of our 
citizenship. 

Shall a Nation which waged a tragic war over the 
issues involved in the formal emancipation of its 
slaves, pause before the problem of that real emanci- 
pation which finds its argument and its appeal in the 
presence of every ignorant and ineffective life .'' The 
freedom to possess one's self is, for white men or 
for black men, by no means all the battle. The 
freedom to possess one's self holds little of security 
or joy till it is followed by at least some measure of 
the freedom of knowledge and some share in the free- 
dom of training. Life without fitness for Hfe is hardly 
happiness, and work without fitness for work is almost 
slavery. Even if there should first be necessary an 
amendment to the national Constitution, what more 



242 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

sacred dogma could stand in the organic law of a 
modern democracy than a provision according at 
least the opportunities of elementary knowledge and 
elementary training to every child of the land ? 

As for the South, there are those who tell us that 
she would object to "outside aid." The apprehen- 
sion is theoretic. That the South would object — as 
other sections and localities would object — to a policy 
of enforced relief, is true. That the South — what- 
ever the course of her political representatives in the 
past — would now oppose such a policy as I have 
attempted to suggest is altogether incredible. In 
substance, she has accepted it. The revenues of the 
Peabody Fund, a fund given in 1867 by a citizen of 
Massachusetts, have been accepted, freely, gladly, 
gratefully, and for more than thirty years, by the pub- 
lic school authorities of every Southern State. The 
educational funds represented by the Slater Board 
and the General Education Board have also been 
accepted, and — like those of the Peabody Board — 
have been wholly inadequate to meet the cogent and 
overwhelming appeals from practically every quarter. 
The agricultural and mechanical colleges of the States 
are directly the creation of federal appropriations, 
appropriations based upon the values of public lands, 
and now everywhere cordially accepted and utilized 
in the educational policy of the South. 

Is it urged that these revenues belong in part to 
the States themselves ? — that they hardly represent 
the acceptance of " outside aid " .'' It is true. It is 
also true that, in the strict analysis of the expression, 
there is no such thing within the whole domain of our 
national administration as " outside aid " — nor can 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 243 

there be. If the South asks for a federal public 
building, it asks no " charity " ; if any section of the 
South asks for a special mail-train, it asks no " out- 
side aid." For the South is not one land and the 
Nation another. The South is within the Nation — 
may make its legitimate requisitions upon the national 
expenditure because toward that expenditure it makes 
its ample contributions. No section of the Nation 
receives, proportionately, so little of the national reve- 
nues. The South is predominantly agricultural. In 
the vast sums collected in the form of a protective 
tariff, but contributed indirectly by American con- 
sumption — Northern and Southern — to the upbuild- 
ing of our country's manufacturing interests, the South 
has had little share. She has contributed her portion 
toward the 1^140,000,000 which the country annually 
distributes through the national pensions.^ Yet these 
revenues are received and expended, for the most 
part, within the States of the North and West. I do 
not call in question the principle of pension reUef. It 
is of some economic significance, however, that the 
fiscal policies and the relief provisions of the govern- 
ment should operate chiefly to the advantage of the 
sections outside the South. This is not in itself a 
reason why pensions should be discontinued or why 
the tariff should be readjusted. And yet it is a rea- 
son why there need be no sensitiveness on the part 
of the South if the South should be included in a 
policy of federal aid in relation to public education. 

^ Since 1893 the cost of the pension system per capita of the whole 
population has gradually fallen, but in that year this cost was ^2.44. 
The expenditure for pul)lic education, per capita of the whole popula- 
tion, was in the same year $2.48. 



244 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

But even if it were otherwise, no section or State 
could well hesitate to receive and use — under a wise 
and equitable system — national revenues appropri- 
ated for national ends. For these revenues are them- 
selves a contribution from the people of the States. 
The South may well receive some portion of what 
the South has given. The Nation's resources, I may 
repeat, are not the vague revenues of a mysterious 
paternalism outside the Northern or Southern States. 
" Outside aid " is an impossible misnomer. In the 
United States of America there is no " outside " : nor 
can there be. The land is one land ; and a democ- 
racy which is everywhere opening to its people an 
equality of political obligation must, in the interest 
of government itself, provide for a fairer distribution 
of educational opportunity. 

One of our greatest Presidents has said that it is 
"the duty of the people to support the government, 
not of the government to support the people." Like 
many an epigram, its truth is wholly dependent upon 
its context and its application. That the expression 
should sometimes have been quoted in criticism of 
the policy of federal appropriations for public edu- 
cation brings us an explicit perversion of its intended 
sense. And yet even here I would not hesitate to 
hold the maxim sound. For as thus applied, the 
saying may but enforce the truth that when govern- 
ment educates it supports itself. What the State 
appropriates for the education of its people, it appro- 
priates not to their support but to the support of 
those stabilities of mind and temper, those habits and 
efficiencies of the popular life, which make of democ- 
racy a rational and consistent order, an institution 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 245 

combining flexibility with permanence and force with 
freedom. When the people, through their govern- 
ment, educate themselves, they educate themselves 
for government. 

Ill 

The movement represented by the Southern and 
General Education Boards — as already stated — is in 
no sense formally identified with the proposal for 
national aid. And yet this movement, however un- 
consciously, has perhaps contributed to that proposal. 
It has brought into the national mind, it has brought 
into the national heart, and has laid upon the national 
conscience, the needs of the rural child, — the child 
not only of the rural South but of the North and West 
as well. And, for one, I am glad that it has done so. It 
is apparent that while philanthropy may appropriately 
serve to make at certain points its demonstrations of 
method, may touch here and there with inspiring 
force a locality, an institution, or an individual, and so 
may turn failure into success, yet the task is too 
appalling in its complexity and its magnitude for the 
resources or the administrations of private bodies. 
These organizations must continue — they have 
worked out all the essential policies of a wise and 
constructive programme — and their field will remain 
even after the cooperation of the national government 
is secured. But it is to our national and collective 
interest, as found and expressed through our national 
legislature, that we may look henceforth for a clearer 
and juster perception of the needs of our rural life. 
How long we may have to wait, no man can say ; 
but in this day, not of socialism, but of vivid social 



246 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

obligations, the stars in their courses seem to fight 
for those who believe that the function of govern- 
ment is not merely the function of a national police, 
is not merely negative, corrective, regulative, but posi- 
tive and affirmative. 

In the meanwhile we may rejoice that there are 
those who, under the pure impulses of a generous 
patriotism, are trying to aid in doing personally what 
the Nation has not done officially. While it is true 
that the Nation has a duty to its citizenship, these 
are also proving that a true citizenship has a duty to 
the Nation. Every true gift of a genuine philan- 
thropy represents the thought of what is due not only 
to the child but to our country. Such a gift is the 
acceptance of the holiest and deepest obligation of 
the citizen to the State. It is his effort to add to the 
forces by which it rebuilds and reconstitutes its life. 

And yet, let us suppose that such a gift were made 
solely for the child's sake, were indeed that real thing 
which the world calls charity, — not the charity of 
condescension, but the charity of a reverent and 
tender love, the motive of that fine, ennobling, human 
grace which puts a man's strength at the service of 
his friend, which puts God's power at the service of 
those who pray, which always places and always will 
place the whole world's wisdom and goodness and 
greatness at the service of a little child, — who then 
will care to stand, as a forbidding and darkening 
barrier, between charity and the children ? 

May I close this chapter, therefore, with a story ; 
not an " historic illustration," but a true story out of 
life .'' It illustrates, as in a simple, human parable, 
that truth of a cooperative and cooperating patriotism 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 247 

upon which we have dwelt so long. It is a story of 
one of the children of Alabama. As its meaning 
comes home to us, we may well leave the mood of 
argument and abstraction for that mood of tender 
and personal affection which makes the deeper nerve 
of every civic cause, of every social faith. 

Some twenty years ago, in one of the smaller 
cities of Alabama, there was born to an honored Con- 
federate soldier and his noble wife, a little daughter. 

For a few brief months she dwelt among them as 
a little presence of bodily happiness and responsive 
charm. Clear eyes, lighted with the strange wisdom 
of innocent babyhood ; soft prattle, making audible 
her rapturous content with the wonder of this great, 
kindly, befriending, human world ; and then, within 
the bitter fate of a few swift hours, there came the 
desolating change. 

It was not death ; it was that tragic compromise by 
which life comes back from death, leaving its laurels 
in death's hands, — life without the seals and sym- 
bols of our living world, — life without sight or hear- 
ing or utterance. Through the tender body of the 
child there had swept a fever, like a scourge of flame, 
that left her forevermore a child of darkness and of 
silence. 

The fever did not take her from her father, her 
mother, her friends, her loved and happy world ; but 
from her it took — all. For seven long years, — deaf, 
speechless, bUnd, she knew no converse with any 
human or living thing. 

You may teach the deaf through the ministry of 
vision ; you may instruct the blind by hearing and by 
speech, but when the blind one cannot hear, and 



248 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

when the deaf cannot see, how may love find a way ? 
Dwelling thus in a silence without light, in a night 
that gave back to her no earthly or heavenly voice, 
the child lived on, her prison darkening as her young 
heart grew older in its warfare. 

And then on a wonderful and ever memorable day, 
there came another change. To this little girl in her 
Southern home there was brought one who found a 
clew, one whose patient and unwearied labor, whose 
brooding insight, found at last a symbol, a common 
term, between her own mind and Helen Keller's im- 
prisoned life. Following that clew, and by adding 
symbol to symbol and term to term, the devoted 
teacher built up for the struggling and eager child, 
upon the single sense of touch, a language ; and 
that language has unlocked for her the whole vast, 
radiant world of books and art and hope and truth 
and love. Helen Keller, now a successful student of 
Radcliffe College in Harvard University, familiar 
with five of the great literatures of our civilization, 
shares a life which, though still deaf and still sight- 
less, is rich in human interests and friendships. Out 
of the dark and silent prison-house there was but one 
door into the glad provinces of culture, fellowship, 
and light, — but one door, and her teacher found for 
her its hidden threshold, opened it, led her forth, and 
keeps her hand in hers to-day ; — the hand no longer 
of a sad, baffled, despairing child, but of a useful and 
happy woman. 

Was it worth doing .■• Was it worth permitting? 
That teacher's hand was the hand of a wise, patient, 
tender, devoted woman of the North. The means 
that have made possible this strange and beautiful 



VII A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION 249 

emancipation have come largely through the consid- 
erate aid of Northern friends, — friends who forgot 
North and South and East and West in the presence 
of a great, saddening, appealing calamity of our hu- 
man life, remembering only that a Httle child in need 
is the rightful heir of all that this world holds. 

A little child in need, — the child in its helpless- 
ness, with its back toward the darkness and the si- 
lence, with its face toward a day dawning over the 
battle-ground of ideas, of institutions, of nations, of 
men, of great, naked, furious, relentless destinies, — 
clashing, contending, devouring, till the doom of 
God; the child facing the battle; the child in a de- 
mocracy, with an outlook from the chariot of the 
King ; the child, — and all humanity within him. There 
lies the constraining motive, the fundamental and in- 
clusive motive, of all the educational poHcies of Church 
or State, of legislation or philanthropy, — the child, 
in whose presence sectionalisms become meaningless 
and humanity becomes supreme. 

The policy of education may be, indeed, a policy 
of national or local self-interest. But the self of 
which we think is the self-hood of our future — the 
locality, the State, the Nation, of our children. Their 
hands rule us while we work. Toward the threshold 
of their enfranchisement they move to-day, through 
all our country, out of the valleys of silence and of 
darkness — hearts breathing toward the hills, faces 
lifted toward the light. Their souls inherit from us 
all things but the strange and fatuous passions that 
divide man from man. Their uplifted hands bear 
no blood-stains of war. Their waiting and eager lives 
know nothing of factions and sections and nations. 



250 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, vii 

They are here, they are ready, and the world is 
theirs. 

The glory, the largess, of all humanity belongs 
to every one of them. Just as no man can prevent 
the poetry of our Lanier from speaking to the child 
of the North, just as no man can prevent the music 
of Longfellow from blessing the child of the South, 
so the wealth and good and truth of all belong for- 
ever to us all. 

Education, all education, is but philanthropy ; and 
philanthropy is but humanity believing in itself and 
in its God, — humanity, with its hand in the child's 
hand, before that door that opens ever Eastward, out 
of the world of the helpless and silent night into the 
world of the far, free day — the world of voices and 
fellowship, of serious, grave, implacable liberties, of 
a little happiness, of much duty and struggle and 
patience, and — if God will — an honest work inspir- 
ing, sustaining, contenting. 



CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 



CHAPTER VIII 

CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 



Culture, in a democracy, is the aspiration of the 
many; and a democracy is to culture but the chal- 
lenge of practical occasions. In the world with 
which we have now to do culture is everybody's 
creed ; and democracy is everybody's chance to put 
the creed to work. 

Manifestly, therefore, culture is more than knowl- 
edge, just as democracy means more than a form 
of government. We need not pause for fixed and 
ultimate definitions. We have no sooner fixed them 
than they cease to be ultimate. Our danger lies not 
in the descriptions we should accept so much as in 
the possible truth of those we might omit ; for all are 
true. Culture — in a broad and liberal sense — is 
but the estate of the human mind when touched by 
the joy of achievement, just as democracy is the 
rule of human numbers come to their conscious 
power. We may find aspects of culture in the 
savage, phases of democracy in the Russias. 
Wherever the achievements of the mind are pleas- 
urably and consciously possessed, we have the begin- 
nings of those aristocracies of sentiment and of those 
distinctions of feeling which have builded the king- 
dom of ideas. Out of small beginnings has come 

253 



254 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

the reign of truth and the authority of loveliness. 
And wherever human multitudes have tasted the 
consciousness of power, of power in their own right, 
we have the vague foreshadowings of a government 
of the people. Government, however, is the least of 
the forms through which the people rule, just as 
scholastic knowledge is the least of the offerings of 
culture. The power of ideas and the power of num- 
bers — through all the range of our human life — 
act and react upon each other. Out of this action 
and reaction, out of these reciprocities of influence, 
what may we say as to the obligation of culture to 
democracy, and as to the obligation of democracy to 
culture .'' 

It were perhaps a simple matter to discuss such 
questions merely as the abstract and unrelated ques- 
tions of social criticism. But such inquiries, for an 
age dominated by a certain imperious sense of actu- 
ality, possess an inevitable context. They fit into 
given scenes and touch upon living issues. It would 
be interesting to discuss them in relation to the 
intellectual habits and the social institutions of 
China. But the American must discuss them in 
America. It would be interesting to point out their 
significance at the North, to trace there the obligations 
of the educated life toward the deep human issues 
that arise in the struggle between labor and capital ; 
to indicate the perils there of a crude emotionalism 
upon the one hand, and of an occasional self- 
sufficiency upon the other, to show, upon both sides, 
the survivals of tyranny and the failure of the fruits 
of freedom, the negation of culture by the cultivated 
and the rejection of democracy among the multitude; 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 255 

but the citizen of the South, writing from within the 
conditions of Southern thought, must discuss these 
questions in their apphcation to the South. 

What, then, is the obhgation of democracy to cul- 
ture ? First of all, the right to live. The obligation 
to accord to the educated Hfe the opportunities of 
knowledge, and then in the interest of democracy 
itself to permit the founding and extending of the 
prerogatives of intellectual freedom. Such liberties 
are far more familiar to the South than the world 
has understood. Recent tests of the principle of 
academic freedom, at the University of Texas, in 
Tennessee, in Virginia, in North Carolina, have indi- 
cated that the South has not altogether failed to 
keep pace with the broader university traditions. 
There have been some Southern lapses, and there 
have been a few, at least, in the North and at the 
West. But the freedom of the intellectual life is 
never fully measured by the standard or the prece- 
dents of the university, nor by the traditions of 
journalistic or political expression ; nor even by the 
truer tests of literature. Social life is a thing of vast 
complexity, and yet a thing of local and individual 
character. A civilization has many ways of talking 
out its mind. Its way may be wholly different from 
the way which is accepted by other civilizations and 
other worlds ; but the fact that its method of expres- 
sion is different does not argue that it is without 
expression. The South is not a land of book-making; 
it is so essentially and predominantly rural that it 
is not a land of great newspapers ; it has been so 
long the land of a fixed political minority that it 
knows little of the clash of great and sincere debate ; 



256 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

but it is peculiarly a land of conversation. The 
North may think it knows something of conversation, 
but the North, as compared with the South, may be 
said never to have enjoyed a conversation. About 
the village courthouse, within the hospitable doors of 
some central store, in the office of the local daily or 
weekly paper, or — above all — in the leisurely and 
genial intercourse around the fireside in winter or 
on the inviting porch in summer, of friend with 
friends, there will be heard a conversation which in 
wit, in the charm and force of its illustrations, and in 
the directness and freedom of its criticism is not sur- 
passed in American life to-day. 

It is the product of leisure, of a world without haste, 
without ruthless preoccupations, without those re- 
sources of expression and of interest which belong to 
the crowded and overweighted existence of the com- 
mercial city. It is, moreover, part of the tradition of 
the Cavalier. It is part of the genius of chmate, and 
soil, and social habit. The Southern speaker who 
addresses a Northern audience is often asked where 
he gets his "stories." They are stories, usually, not 
only with humor but with meaning. He hardly 
knows. They are vivid, inherited possessions. They 
have come down to him from a land in which conver- 
sation is an art, and in which it is not mere art alone 
but the supreme vehicle of social criticism. 

That this vehicle — despite its individuality and 
efficiency — is increasingly inadequate must be evi- 
dent enough. The complexity and the activities of 
industrial transformation are making an end of the 
old leisure and of the old possibilities which it in- 
volved, and are thus making a larger demand for a 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 257 

more explicit and more active leadership in politics, 
in the press, the pulpit, the university. This leader- 
ship is fast appearing. In politics it will probably be 
longest delayed — through causes as operative in the 
North as in the South — and yet there are men in 
the poHtical life of the South who, though holding no 
longer the centre of the national stage, are truly the 
heirs of whatever is noblest and freest in the public 
service of their country. 

The press, as with the press of the world at large, 
is sometimes chargeable with a hysteria and a per- 
versity which are the despair of a rational hopeful- 
ness, and yet upon the really vital issues in the life of 
the South the press has been a free and patriotic 
force. What newspapers of our country have stood 
more persistently and effectively for law and order 
than the Atlanta Constitution, the Montg07nery Ad- 
vertiser, the Nezv Orleaiis Times-Democrat, the Ra- 
leigh News and Observer, the Charleston News and 
Courier — not to mention a score of others whose 
course has been as honorable .-' The writer has exam- 
ined nearly two thousand editorials of the American 
press on the subject of child labor. No editorials 
have been comparable to those of the South in 
fulness of knowledge, intensity of interest, or vigor 
and directness of expression. The files of the daily 
State of Columbia, South Carolina, represent for a 
course of two years the ablest handling of a human 
industrial issue that our country has known since the 
period of emancipation. As for the pulpit of the 
South, a popular writer has charged it with a cow- 
ardly silence in relation to our industrial problems, 
and has intimated, with grotesque inaptness, that the 



2S8 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

child-labor abuses of the South were due to the 
complicity of the Christian clergy. At the very 
time when this criticism was written, the reform 
committees in charge of the propaganda for protec- 
tive legislation in the several Southern States were, 
almost without exception, headed by a clergyman of 
the Christian Church. The South is the subject of a 
general national interest, but it is not the subject, 
unfortunately, of a general national information. 
There have been clergymen who from motives good 
or bad have not aided sympathetically in the press- 
ing of industrial reforms. But, upon the whole, the 
clergy of the South rang nobly true upon that es- 
pecial issue, and they spoke from individual pulpits 
and through the action of church assemblies with a 
freedom and a vigor which the clergy of the North — 
upon like issues — have not surpassed. 

The universities of the South have shared in the 
common national struggle for the freedom of the 
teacher, and while much remains to be accomplished, 
the conflict — as has been suggested — has not been 
without its signal triumphs. Another, and yet a 
cognate, struggle for the raising of academic stand- 
ards has been quite as inspiring ; and the leadership 
of men like Kirkland of Vanderbilt, Wiggins of Se- 
wanee, Denny of Washington and Lee, and Alder- 
man of Tulane, is achieving definite and permanent 
results. More important still are those forces of 
popular leadership which — through the whole domain 
of our Southern States — have issued from our uni- 
versities for the upbuilding of the common schools. 
To the support of popular education, to the enlarge- 
ment of the life, the training, the freedom, of the 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 259 

masses of the people these men have unselfishly 
dedicated capacity and energy and labor, and in an 
educational revival which has become one of the 
most significant movements of our century they are 
helping to make of our democracy not merely a theory 
of politics but a civic creed. 

And yet with explicit appreciation of the vigor and 
the freedom of the leadership which now exists — in 
politics, the press, the pulpit, the university — it is 
obvious that the conditions which have made its 
existence difficult have reduced its volume and will 
continually threaten its efficiency. The South pos- 
sesses a peculiar " problem " — bequeathed to it under 
tragic conditions and continued under every circum- 
stance which might increase its perplexities and its 
burdens. The political solution which was attempted 
by the North was apparently involved — by those 
who undertook it — with a number of unwise and 
unsympathetic methods in negro education and with 
what was popularly regarded as an experiment in 
"social equality." The three proposals — political, 
educational, social — thus became identified, how- 
ever mistakenly, in the popular imagination of the 
South, and each phase of Northern activity became 
so intimately associated with the other — especially 
in the thought of the ignorant — that the task of 
clarification has seemed almost impossible. To the 
baffling confusion of the situation was added the fact 
that the responsible interest of the South was largely 
ignored and — upon the assumption that the South's 
opposition to the freedman's social and political 
assimilation involved the South's opposition to his 
every right — the problem was assumed to be wholly 



26o THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

a problem of the North, Beneath the North's seri- 
ous and rightful sense of obligation the South saw- 
only an intolerant "interference." Beneath the 
South 's natural suspicion and solicitude the North 
saw only an undiscriminating enmity to herself and 
to the negro. Both interpretations were unfounded. 
The South, however, passed from a mood of compar- 
ative indifference to a mood of active and unyielding 
criticism, a criticism which expressed — in one form 
or another — the central contention that the problem 
had never been the North's and must always remain 
the South's ; that having attempted its solution upon 
the basis of universal suffrage, and, in 1876, having 
confessed its failure by the withdrawal of its military 
support of the reconstruction governments, the North 
was bound to remand the problem to the Southern 
States. In the stricter sense, the problem is not the 
South's or the North's, but the Nation's ; and yet, as 
has been suggested, its local home does lie within the 
South, and the ultimate forces of its solution must 
therefore be predominantly Southern in their genius 
and environment. In any event, it is evident to-day 
that the popular forces of American life are only too 
ready to leave the question — in its deepest issues — 
with the people of the Southern States ; and there- 
fore, to-day, as never before, the negro problem is, in 
fact, the South's. 

In an older period, when the question was within 
the physical as well as the moral control of alien and 
unsympathetic forces, it was natural that the attitude 
of Southern thought should have been an attitude of 
protest, and that its criticism should have been chiefly 
negative and corrective. That period made men nat- 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 261 

urally resentful of " advice," naturally suspicious and 
contemptuous of " theories." It was the period of 
reconstruction, — a period of much administrative 
sordidness, but also of memorable heroism among 
numbers of the men and v^^omen who undertook the 
freedmen's initiation into the experience of the citi- 
zen. Its successes, however, were hidden, deep, not 
easily observable ; its blunders were observable and 
conspicuous. It was to have been expected, therefore, 
that in the presence of palpable mistakes which it 
was powerless to rectify, the mind of the South should 
have become reticent or indifferent or occasionally 
cynical, and that its tendency to deal with the whole 
question negatively rather than positively should have 
become an established intellectual habit. 

But that period has passed, and with the passing 
of that period there arises a larger and clearer need 
for the contribution to this question, as to every ques- 
tion of the South, of a positive and constructive 
leadership, — a leadership no longer reactionary or 
obstructive, but, while awed by responsibility, equipped 
with learning, vital with suggestion, altogether un- 
trammelled in utterance, and therefore consciously 
and confidently free. 

It is in the interest of the South herself that such 
a leadership — not in one profession or one class but 
in all — should be more largely developed and sus- 
tained. Dark indeed must be the fate of any land if 
compelled to approach the solution of any significant 
problem of its life with its lips sealed and its reason 
bound. In the interest of her own solution of her 
own problems, the South will, of necessity, assume 
that her policies are not to be determined from the 



262 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

standpoint of the ignorant or from the standpoint 
of the crude devices of party tactics, but from the 
standpoint of her best life — desiring the total good. 
For the very reason that her problems are so dififi- 
cult and so acute, the South is entitled to the larg- 
est knowledge, and to the freest, clearest thinking of 
which her sons are capable. For the reason that the 
problem is so largely committed to the South, the life 
and thought of the South are under every obligation 
to deal with it affirmatively and constructively. In 
the leadership which would respond to this obligation 
there will be errors, — some of them really serious, 
som.e of them serious only to those who fail to realize 
that all progressive movement anywhere must neces- 
sarily involve a little of that trait of the injudicious 
which is the fine infirmity of disinterested courage. 
When great issues are at stake the counsels of caution 
become sometimes an intolerable and impossible fetich. 
Mistakes will, of course, be made, but the South will 
also make a demonstration of capacity and courage 
which will accomplish real results. Anything is 
better than a situation in which — North and South — 
we too often find the ignorant assertive and the edu- 
cated silent, the ignorant aggressive and the educated 
acquiescent, the ignorant recording with a pathetic 
but sinister intolerance the decrees of academic or 
political policy, and the educated exhausting their 
powers only in the familiar exercises of private lam- 
entation. It is true, upon the other hand, that in a 
democracy the influence of the best experience is 
often limited or defeated by the aUiance of the tra- 
ditional forces of leadership with the very ignorance 
which needs correction. The political platform, the 



Vlll CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 263 

pulpit, the university, the journalism of the hour, are 
expected to prey — for their existence — upon the 
errors which demand redress. The multitudes of a de- 
mocracy should insist, however, that in their own in- 
terest the forces of leadership shall really lead. The 
people must come to expect service rather than flat- 
tery — a service which may involve, in the interest of 
its usefulness, the examination and criticism of popu- 
lar misconceptions. 

For the errors of a democracy are attended with 
peculiar and disastrous cost. In a monarchy or 
oligarchy, general administrative wrongs are willed 
from above downward upon the masses of social life. 
The people may endure them or approve them, but 
the people have never willed them, have never spirit- 
ually accepted them. When, however, a democracy 
goes wrong, the people have done more than go wrong; 
they have willed to go wrong. Wrong has entered, 
by a certain process of collective participation, into 
the national Hfe and the national spirit. Its effect is 
not registered in the life of the majority alone. The 
consequences of elective action pass back from the 
action itself into the will ; and multitudes who, before, 
were faintly right or at least not convinced of error, 
grow in a subtle way to feel that what the majority 
has ordered is to be henceforth accepted not only as 
an authoritative policy, but as a moral finality. Un- 
less, therefore, a democracy is to give a spiritual au- 
thority to occasional majorities which they ought 
hardly to possess, and unless there is to be no effec- 
tive appeal from the tyranny of popular moods, the 
conditions of a genuine moral and intellectual leader- 
ship must be consistently sustained. The essential 



264 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

obligation of democracy to culture is thus no mere 
obligation to the aesthetic arts or to academic science 
— sacred as these must be — but an obligation to 
accord trust and reverence everywhere to the policies 
of freedom, an obligation consistent with the rights 
of the majority, but consistent also with that larger 
perspective of history in which it has not infrequently 
appeared that those who have served democracy most 
truly are those who have saved the people from them- 
selves. 

II 

Turning thus more directly to the thought of the 
obligation of culture toward a democratic order, it 
must be obvious that its first duty is in large measure 
to itself. Its own light — in the Church, in the uni- 
versity, in the home of the citizen — must be kept 
pure and clear. No enthusiasm for the education 
of " the masses " should be suffered to obscure the 
dignity and the necessity of the scholar's life. But 
the law of self-preservation is, after all, but an aspect 
of the law of service. And the law of service is but 
an aspect of the law of self-preservation. A culture 
which holds itself in detachment from the vital issues 
of experience, which has things to say in reference 
to the economic heresies of Germany or Russia, but 
nothing to say in reference to the economic perils of 
its own land, which deals at the North only with the 
" problems of the backward South " or at the South 
only with the problems of the " materialistic North," 
a culture which ignores its own context, will not long 
be taken seriously even by itself. If it be not inter- 
ested in life, it will soon cease to be interested in any- 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 265 

thing ; and, consuming itself upon itself, it will pass 
at length into the dry-rot of a nerveless and unfruitful 
cynicism. 

The quickening of the nerve of culture within the 
life of the South has been largely due to the response 
which its educated men, and especially its educated 
women, are giving to social needs. For example, the 
teaching force in the schools and universities of the 
South is, in its personnel, as noble a social force as 
a democracy has known. It is not surpassed even 
by the inspiring standards of early New England. 
And yet culture, as a force of citizenship, may not 
busy itself exclusively with the traditional interests 
of technical education. A rising generation is edu- 
cated not only by its schools but by the forces of 
established custom, by the pressure of traditional 
truth or traditional error, by the habits of opinion, 
the assumptions of popular feehng, the dogmas of 
collective sentiment, within which it looks outward 
and upward into life. These bear with intimate and 
often with decisive pressure upon those who are just 
beginning to accept for their own land and time the 
larger heritage of womanhood and manhood. Cul- 
ture has, therefore, a duty toward the scholastic 
training of our democratic life ; but it has also a 
duty toward that vast body of traditional preposses- 
sions which form the broader educative forces of 
society. It is an obligation of sympathetic, intelli- 
gent, but unflinching criticism. 

If we turn for illustrations to the South, it is not 
because I could not find them at the North, but 
because the North — for the purposes of this volume 
— is " another story." And the thought of the 



266 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

South must, for the sake of the South, concern itself 
supremely with certain confusions of sentiment within 
the Southern States. Indeed, a few of these illus- 
trations are chosen for us ; chosen both by the obtru- 
sive and persistent form of the errors themselves and 
by the gratifying and increasing evidence of Southern 
protest. There was a time when one of the most 
potent of these prepossessions had reality and author- 
ity, when the cry of "negro domination" rang through 
the heart of the South with an intelligible although an 
indescribable terror. Yet for now more than twenty 
years, a negro officialism or the preponderance of an 
ignorant negro vote has been impossible. The negro 
vote may hold the balance of power at this or that 
point where the white vote is evenly divided. That 
is true of New York City with its 18,651 negro votes; 
or of the city of Philadelphia with its 20,000. The 
negro, however, votes nowhere as a unit except at the 
South, and the solidity of his vote is largely due to 
the force of that external pressure which thus creates 
the very " peril " it has attempted to defeat. If the 
negro votes were not driven together in a mass, there 
could be no decisive power in the minority which they 
represent. And even where they represent a major- 
ity, — where do they rule .'' or where have they ruled 
for these twenty years .'' The South, with all its 
millions of negroes, has to-day not a negro congress- 
man, not a negro governor or senator. A few obscure 
justices of the peace, a few negro mayors in small 
villages of negro people, and — if we omit the few 
federal appointees — we have written the total of all 
the negro officials of our Southern States. Every 
possibility of negro domination vanishes to a more 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 267 

shadowy and more distant point with every year, with 
every dollar invested in Southern properties, with every 
white man come into the South to live, with every mile 
of railways, telegraphs, and telephones, with every 
penny expended for public education. The peril of 
the supremacy of the colored population is the merest 
" bogie." It was never possible, except through the 
support of miHtary force. That force has been, for 
nearly thirty years, withdrawn. It will never enter 
the South again. The whole country has so willed 
it ; and if it could come again, our intelligent and 
conservative negroes would be the first to suspect 
its motive and to repudiate its odious compulsion. 
Among all the absurdities of conjecture, and among 
all the ridiculous imaginations of theoretic horror, 
there is just now no phantom so spectral in its sub- 
stance or so pitifully trivial in its proportions as this 
" peril " of negro domination. And yet in certain 
sections of our Southern States it is still an "issue," 
is still the first theme of political oratory and the last 
excuse of civic negligence. In counties where there 
are hardly enough negroes to form a docile and 
amused " example," and where probably less than a 
hundred negro votes have been cast within a decade, 
gaping crowds are yet thrilled by stentorian assertion 
of " the white man's unalterable vow — in the face of 
all the legions of brutal and insidious conspiracy — to 
maintain inviolate the proud dominion of the Cauca- 
sian," — and so forth. The real interests of party are 
forgotten ; the educative power of sincere political 
debate, the progressive and wholesome influence of 
the division of men and factions upon contemporary 
issues and in reference to legitimate political ideas. 



268 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

are all but abandoned, and the political education of 
large and potentially efficient masses of American 
voters is dominated by a crude frenzy of the hustings 
which seldom has either sincerity or validity except 
as a party lash. And this, even, is a failing function. 
Sober and responsible men throughout the South are 
growing very, very tired of it. The red-shirt brigades 
of one Southern State were called into existence not 
so much to awe the negroes as to " arouse " the white 
vote. In another of our Southern States the vote for 
the constitutional convention, distinctly solicited on 
the old issue of " white supremacy," received the 
suffrages of less than a third of the Democratic voters. 
Not that anybody was opposed to "white supremacy." 
That was precisely the reason why two-thirds of the 
voters stayed at home. They knew perfectly well that 
no one was opposed to it, and that the cry which called 
them to preserve it and to perpetuate it was a strident 
but famihar fiction. Those who voted for the con- 
vention voted for it not because they thought white 
supremacy was in danger but because they wished to 
put the supremacy of the intelHgence and property 
of the State under the securities of law. 

" Negro domination " as a force of party control, 
as a weapon of poUtical constraint, is fast losing its 
authority. Great masses of the people are beginning 
to " know better." Its passing, as a party cry, will 
help both the Democracy and the South. The sooner 
the Democratic party comes to understand that, if it 
would hold the allegiance of the intelHgent masses 
of our Southern States, it must represent, not a futile 
programme of negation, animosity, and alarm, but a 
policy of simple ideals and of constructive suggestion 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 269 

— a course which has given the party its historic 
position in our life — the better it will be both for the 
party and for the South. The South can then divide, 
and can make its divisions turn upon thought, fact, 
conviction. Every party and every section demands, 
in the interest of its broadest welfare, that there shall 
work within its regions, its traditions, and its ideas, 
the searching, sifting, divisive, regenerative forces of 
truth upon its merits. If this is not to be the privi- 
lege of the South, and if the masses of our people — 
through the wanton provocation of the North, or 
through the failure of our own party leadership — 
are to be still possessed by the old benumbing and 
baffling terror, then we shall have, as we have had in 
part already, a form of negro domination which we 
have least suspected. The soldier of old who bound 
his captive to his wrist bound more than the wretched 
captive. If his slave was bound to him, he was 
hardly the less in bondage to his slave. If the su- 
preme apprehension of the South is to be the appre- 
hension of negro domination, if our intensest effort, 
our characteristic and prevailing policies, our deepest 
social faiths, are to look no further than the negro, 
are to be ever busied with the crude fictions of negro 
power, and ever clouded by the outworn demand for 
the negro's bondage, then, at either end of this 
clanking chain, there is a Hfe bound. If we are 
so morbidly afraid of the spectral possibilities of 
the negro's freedom that we must keep him ever 
in a prison, then let us remember that on both 
sides of the prison door there is a man in duress ; 
for he who keeps a jail is hardly freer than his pris- 
oner. This is the domination that we have really 



270 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

to fear, the domination wrought upon the mind of 
a strong and sensitive people by the presence of a 
weaker race ; a domination so possessing the imagi- 
nation, with an alarm half uncontrollable and half 
contemptuous ; so inducing perplexity to thought, 
and so constraining into fixed and peculiar forms 
the course of its whole experience, that the weaker 
race acts upon the social nerve of the stronger race 
as the occasion of habitual hysteria, touching even 
its saner moments as the all-absorbing preoccupation 
of its culture and its life. This indeed would be 
negro domination. Its existence upon any wide or 
inclusive scale would make impossible the simplest 
assumptions of a truly democratic order. To protest 
against it, to define its possibility, and yet to destroy 
its possibility by the demonstration of its needless- 
ness — this, of definite tasks, is among the first of the 
obligations of our culture to our democracy. 

Ill 

The educated life of the South, capable of clear 
thinking and of just discriminations, will also deal 
with some of the misconceptions which have gathered 
about the topic of " social equality " between the 
races. But while dealing with misconception it will 
be compelled, in order to prevent blunders greater 
than those it would correct, to conceive and restate, 
in positive forms, the implicit racial passion which 
underlies the cruder phases of racial antipathy. 
Here, as always, the recognition of truth may well 
precede the correction of error. And this truth is 
quite as vital to the interest of the negro as to the 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 271 

interest of the white man. The total abandonment 
of the dogma of racial integrity at the South would 
mean a land — not white, nor part white and part 
black — but a land all black; with perhaps many of 
those reversions of the standards of political and 
social life which have been exhibited in Hayti and 
San Domingo. The possibility of racial fusion is 
not now repugnant to the instinct of the average 
negro, repugnant as it is to the instinct of the aver- 
age white man, and this fact — the fact that the in- 
stinct of the black man is usually ready to abandon 
the individuality of his race — puts the white popula- 
tion upon its guard and leads it to perceive a sinister 
significance in some of the most harmless occasions 
of racial contact. A number of the wisest leaders of 
the negro race are seeking to develop a deeper sense 
of racial pride. Until negro feeling and opinion are 
generally organized, however, into more tenacious 
and more articulate support of negro race integrity, 
we may expect that the instinct of racial integrity 
among the masses of our white people will lead 
always to apprehension, sometimes to suspicion, 
and occasionally to unreasonable and uncontrollable 
assertion. 

For, whatever the supreme interest of the negro 
race, it is obvious that the supreme interest of the 
white race is the interest of racial purity, a purity 
necessarily inconsistent with the slightest compromise 
in the direction of racial fusion. That the individual- 
ity of the white race has been sometimes betrayed by 
its own representatives — betrayed in response to the 
lowest passions — is conspicuously evident. That pub- 
lic opinion should have dealt too leniently with such 



272 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

offences is due to two causes — to the fact that those 
who are guilty of them are for the most part too 
ignoble to be amenable to any opinion whatever ; and 
to the fact that all social life, Northern or Southern, 
European or American, deals inconsistently and in- 
sincerely with social evils. Explanations, however, 
are not excuses ; and with the existence of so much 
natural antipathy toward the negro who would trans- 
gress the barriers of race, there must arise a clearer 
perception of the truth that the racial integrity of 
the Caucasian is threatened, most seriously and in- 
sidiously, not by the negro but by the degraded 
white man. 

The formative assumptions, the ultimate dogmas 
of a civilization are to be determined, however, not 
from the failures of the few but from the concep- 
tions, the laws, the habits, of the many. The present 
evidences of racial admixture are due not primarily 
to the period of slavery (for the old negroes are the 
black negroes), nor chiefly to the period of the pres- 
ent, but rather to the period immediately following 
the Civil War, when the presence at the South of 
vast numbers of the military forces of both sections 
— the lower classes of the Northern army demoralized 
by idleness, the lower classes of the Southern army 
demoralized by defeat — were thrown into contact 
with the negro masses at the moment of their greatest 
helplessness. Here and there in specific groups 
within selected negro communities racial admixture 
may now seem to be increasing, but this increase 
is apparent rather than real. It is only the perpetua- 
tion of an admixture that, once existent, will naturally 
continue in its own hne. Among the great masses 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 273 

of the race, especially through the illimitable stretches 
of the rural South, the black people are still black. 
Every tendency of the present seems to be making 
not toward their disintegration but toward that social 
and domestic segregation demanded by their own in- 
terest as well as by the interest of the stronger race 
about them. 

And yet it is inconceivable that this segregation of 
the race should involve its degradation. That would 
be a conclusion as unworthy of logic as it would be 
unworthy of life ; a conclusion disastrous to every 
interest of the South. The perils involved in the 
progress of the negro are as nothing compared to the 
perils invited by his failure. And yet if any race is 
to live it must have something to live for. It will 
hardly cling with pride to its race integrity if its race 
world is a world wholly synonymous with deprivation, 
and if the world of the white man is the only generous 
and honorable world of which it knows. It will hardly 
hold with tenacity to its racial standpoint, it will 
hardly give any deep spiritual or conscious allegiance 
to its racial future if its race life is to be forever bur- 
dened with contempt, and denied the larger possibili- 
ties of thought and effort. The true hope, therefore, 
of race integrity for the negro lies in establishing for 
him, within his own racial life, the possibilities of 
social differentiation. 

A race which must ever be tempted to go outside 
of itself for any share in the largeness and the free- 
dom of experience will never be securely anchored in 
its racial self-respect, can never achieve any legitimate 
racial standpoint, and must be perpetually tempted — 
as its members rise — to desert its own distinctive 



274 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

life and its own distinctive service to the world. 
There is no hope for a race which begins by de- 
spising itself. The winning of generic confidence, 
of a legitimate racial pride, will come with the 
larger creation — for the capable — of opportunity 
within the race. The clew to racial integrity for 
the negro is thus to be found, as stated in an 
earlier chapter, not in race suppression but in race 
sufficiency. For the very reason that the race, in the 
apartness of its social hfe, is to work out its destiny 
as the separate member of a larger group, it must 
be accorded its own leaders and thinkers, its own 
scholars, artists, prophets ; and while the develop- 
ment of the higher hfe may come slowly, even blun- 
deringly, it is distinctly to be welcomed. As the 
race comes to have within itself, within its own social 
resources, a world that is worth living for, it will gain 
that individual foothold among the famihes of men 
which will check the despairing passion of its self- 
obhteration; and instead of the temptation to abandon 
its place among the races of the world it will begin 
to claim its own name and its own life. That is the 
only real, the only permanent security of race integ- 
rity for the negro. Its assumption is not degradation, 
but opportunity. 

Thus understood, I think the educated opinion of 
the South has no war with the progress of the negro. 
It has feared the consequences of that progress only 
when they have seemed to encroach upon the life of 
the stronger race.^ It is willing that the negro, within 

1 "There is a certain amount of race hatred, of course, and there are 
reasons for this, but the best Southern people not only do not hate the 
negro, but come nearer to having affection for him than any other peo- 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 275 

his own social world, shall become as great, as true, as 
really free, as nobly gifted as he has capacity to be. It 
has fixed its barriers — in no enmity of temper but in 
the interest of itself and its civilization, and not with- 
out regard to the ultimate welfare of the negro. It 
cannot base its social distinctions on an assertion of 
universal " inferiority " — for in that case every 
gifted or truly educated negro might shake the struc- 
ture of social usage. It bases its distinctions partly 
upon the far-reaching consideration that the racial 
stock of the two families of men is so unlike that 
nothing is to be gained and much is to be lost from 
the interblending of such divergent types ; partly 
upon the broad consideration of practical expediency, 
in that the attempt to unite them actually brings 
unhappiness ; partly upon the inevitable persistence 
of the odium of slavery ; partly upon a complex, 

pie. They are too wise not to realize that posterity will judge them 
according to the wisdom they use in this great concern. They are too 
just not to know that there is but one thing to do with a human being, 
and that thing is to give him a chance, and that it is a solemn duty of 
the white man to see that the negro gets his chance in everything save 
' social equality ' and political control. 

"The Southern people believe with their usual intensity that it is 
the duty of civilization always to protect the higher groups against the 
deteriorating influence of the lov/er groups. This does not mean that 
the lower should be prevented from rising, but that it should not be 
permitted to break down the higher. 

" The improvement and progress of the backward nations and races 
should all come by improving the conditions of their own group, but 
should never be permitted to come at the expense of the higher or 
more advanced group, nation, or race. Social equality or political con- 
trol would mean deterioration of the advanced group, and the South is 
serving the Nation when it says it shall not be so." — Edwin A. Alder- 
man, LL.D., President of Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, 
before the American Economic Association, December 29, 1903. 



276 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

indefinable, but assertive social instinct.^ This instinct 
operates almost as remorselessly at the North as at 
the South.^ The North is sometimes inclined to 
think that it exercises a loftier discrimination because 
it accords a genial social recognition to this or that 
gifted negro visitor from the South. Such an act 
involves little more than a transient courtesy. It is 
no test of the real attitude of the North toward the 
question of "social equality." That test is found in 
the attitude of the social forces of the Northern city 
toward the negroes of their community, toward their 
own fellow townsmen and townswomen, toward the 
whole permanent and complex problem of social reci- 
procities between families as well as between individ- 
uals. What is the social status of the negro family 
whose home is in Boston, or Philadelphia, or New 
York ? Is it essentially different from its status at 
the South ? Are not the few courtesies extended only 
the more bitter because through them it feels the 
emphasis upon those which are withheld .■' Is not the 

1 See a selected passage from the Romanes Lecture, by James Bryce, 
on page 330, of the Appendix of this volume. 

2 In the city of Boston, Massachusetts, for example, in a population 
of a half million inhabitants, including twelve thousand negroes, there 
is practically no intermarriage of the races. The instances that occur 
are usually confined to the lower elements of both races and possess no 
serious social significance. " Such couples are usually absorbed by the 
negro race, although if they belong to the more educated class they 
enter into natural relations with neither race." ... " Barred out from 
the society he most admires, his mimicry only excites mirth, and when 
he touches the white race on grounds of social equality, it is the meet- 
ing of outcast with outcast." — See " Americans in Process," a settle- 
ment study of the North and West Ends, Boston, by residents and 
associates of the South End House ; edited by Robert A. Woods, pp. 
60, 148; Boston; Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1902. 



viil CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 277 

custom of the South, save when pressed to morbid 
and unusual conclusions, happier as a modus vivendi 
than the custom of the North ? 

But be that as it may, the South in establish- 
ing the dogma of race integrity has done so, not 
in order to enforce a policy of degradation, but sim- 
ply to express her own faith in a policy of separa- 
tion. Her desire is not to condemn the negro 
forever to a lower place but to accord to him an- 
other place. She believes that where two great 
racial masses, so widely divergent in history and 
character, are involved in so much of local and 
industrial contact, a clear demarcation of racial life 
is in the interest of intelligent cooperation, and — in 
spite of occasional hardships — is upon the whole 
conservative of the happiness of both. During the 
opening of the great Southwest to private settlers 
there was an extended period of a ^?/rt:i'/-collective 
ownership upon the unrestricted prairies. Men grazed 
their herds at will. There soon arose, however, the con- 
fusion of boundaries and a consequent multiplicity of 
feuds. Then a number of the settlers, in order to define 
their limits, began to put up fences. Those who first 
did so were regarded as the intolerant enemies of 
peace. Soon, however, men began to see that peace 
is sometimes the result of intelligent divisions, that 
the attempt to maintain a collective policy through 
the confusion of individual rights had broken down ; 
that clear lines, recognized and well-defined, made 
mightily for good will ; that the best friends were the 
men who had the best fences. And so there arose 
the saying, " Good fences make good neighbors." 

Certainly, however, the educated life of the South 



278 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, 

must do its utmost to see that racial divisions are in 
fact intelligently made and that the dogma of race 
integrity is not subjected to morbid and irrational 
applications. In the direct interest of its existence 
and its usefulness, it must not be made ridiculous. 
To assume that every incident at the North — how- 
ever unwise — of rumored or actual departure from 
Southern customs is an " insult " to the South or an 
" attack " upon its life is to assume that the South 
may dictate not only for itself but for all the Nation, 
and it is to imply that the North must be denied 
the very liberty which the South is so rightfully 
jealous to assert. The two sections are so largely 
different in social feeling and domestic custom 
that it will long be difficult, however, for one to 
understand the other. In the South, the table, 
simple though its fare may be, possesses the sanctity 
of an intimate social institution. To break bread 
together involves, or may involve, everything. In 
the North, especially in its larger cities, the table 
of the social dinner or of the general banquet is 
often but a useful device for getting together those 
who perhaps could not possibly be induced to get 
together under any other conceivable conditions. 
The social occasion usually involves nothing beyond 
itself. In this respect, and in others equally im- 
portant. Northern conditions and Southern conditions 
are unlike. That this unlikeness in conditions is 
becoming more generally understood by the discrimi- 
nating public, North and South, is evident. But that 
this clearer and broader understanding will obtain in 
either section, among every element of the popula- 
tion, is not immediately probable. Here and there 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 279 

at the North the journalism of moral petulancy, 
abandoning the standpoint of the broader representa- 
tives of the Northern press, will still insist upon read- 
ing "pro-slavery" designs into the elementary and 
most imperative policies of the South, and will find 
" hatred of the negro " in customs which have pro- 
tected him from hatred and have made possible his 
existence and his happiness. In recent years nothing 
has been more marked, however, than the growing 
appreciation of the perplexities and difficulties of the 
South upon the part of the press of the North. As 
it approaches a truly national standpoint, it will con- 
tribute to truly national ends. 

And at the South we may also expect to find, here 
and there, those who will too readily contribute to 
sectional misunderstandings, who will misinterpret 
the feeling of the North, who will continue to seize 
upon every pretext which may be twisted into a 
sinister significance, and will discover in incidents 
to which the North is wholly indifferent a studied 
and malignant plot against the life and peace of 
the Southern States. Here, too, is the golden oppor- 
tunity of the politician of the lower type. Dread- 
ing lest the masses of the people should begin to 
think beyond his leading and to divide upon the 
varied legitimate issues of principle or policy, he 
seizes upon almost any excuse to raise and to 
vitalize the fading terror of " negro domination," 
thus to perpetuate still further — in order that he 
may still profit by — the political solidarity which 
was created by it. Not only at the North but within 
many sections of the South itself, the slightest con- 
tact with the negro upon the part of white men who 



28o THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

may be interested in his welfare is often watched 
with a sensitive anxiety, and the fear lest there may 
be some possible or shadowy indiscretion is often the 
basis of unjust and unreasonable rumor, or the occa- 
sion, if there be enmity toward the helper or the 
helped, for fertile and mischievous detraction. 

It should be the duty of educated opinion, as 
expressed through the pulpit, the press, the univer- 
sity, to insist calmly but resolutely upon the function 
of discrimination. Such an exercise of discrimina- 
tion is in no sense inconsistent with the opinion that 
this or that incident of racial contact. North or South, 
is injudicious or unfortunate. Blunders, vicious or 
ingenuous, will necessarily be thought about and 
talked about. To exaggerate, however, this or that 
trivial incident into a vast and ominous peril, to 
receive the evidence of an exhibition of questionable 
discretion, here or there, in North or South, as though 
it involved a legitimate occasion for the frenzy of 
multitudes, as though it seriously threatened the fate 
of peoples and the very stability of a civilization, is 
to take issue with common sense, is to suggest that if 
the dogma of race integrity is so easily disturbed, it 
cannot be deeply rooted, and is likely to remove that 
dogma — in the opinion of the world — from the cate- 
gory of legitimate social hypotheses — where it 
belongs — to the category of malignant and fanci- 
ful prepossessions, to be opposed in the strong and 
to be humored only in the weak. 

A little discrimination, a little poise, a little of that 
equable capacity which can note the distinction be- 
tween incidents great and small, a little clear-headed 
appreciation of the perspective of events, a due sense 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 281 

of proportion, will aid — as nothing else can aid — 
in the secure establishment of the doctrine of race 
individuality and integrity. No doctrine or dogma 
can be so injuriously compromised as by its wanton 
and unintelligent exaggerations. A doctrine is 
always held most strongly when it is held sanely. 



IV 



The culture of the South will find, however, the 
occasions of its supreme and immediate interest, not 
in the issues presented by the negro, but in the prob- 
lems presented by the undeveloped forces of the 
stronger race. These must largely constitute the 
determining factor, even in the problem presented by 
the negro ; for the negro question is not primarily a 
question of the negro among negroes, but a question 
of the negro surrounded by another and a stronger 
people. The negro is in a white environment; the 
white man is largely the market for his labor and the 
opportunity for his progress, as well as the social and 
political model of his imitative spirit. Where we 
find the negro in relation to the trained and educated 
representatives of the stronger race, we find few of 
the evidences of racial friction. 

But the white race, in the interest of the efficiency 
and the happiness of the masses of its own life, must 
bring its culture still more closely into relation with 
social needs. That the presence of child labor has 
called out strong and wholesome protest, that all the 
more helpless factors of our industrial system have 
commanded a deep and effective public interest, has 



282 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

been recorded. And yet in certain sections and 
among certain forces of the South there has been 
encountered much indifference or positive opposition 
to the bettering of industrial conditions. The causes 
for opposition are many, and have been stated in an 
earlier chapter. Among these causes, however, the 
most serious is one which is not peculiar to the South, 
but which is finding, throughout our country, an 
increasing power in the shaping of our social deci- 
sions. It is the exaggeration of the importance of 
the money element as contrasted with the human ele- 
ment in the world's work. For many years the South 
struggled against almost inconceivable odds in order 
to regain her place in the commercial experience of our 
country. She had men, women, children, resources, 
but little else. The process of rehabilitation is now 
rising to completion. Business is growing. Wealth, 
slowly but surely, is coming into her life. How much 
is it worth ? There are those who seem to think that 
it is worth the exploitation of the ignorant and the 
helpless, who regard all " reforms " as the phases of 
a Pecksniffian hypocrisy, who not infrequently have 
stock in the enterprises affected by the suggestions 
of amendment, but who are " good " people and who 
give largely to charitable and semi-charitable institu- 
tions. There are others, however, who, while sensi- 
ble of the good which men may accomplish with their 
money, are sensible also of the fact that, with money 
gotten under false conditions, any blessing which its 
giving brings can never equal the curse which its get- 
ting leaves, — leaves in that region out of sight where 
the ignorant and the poor go with a bitter silence to 
their fate, and the young, in their tender strength, 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 283 

give life itself when they are only paid for labor. To 
those who have seen these things, all that money can 
add to a trade, an industry, a civilization, does not 
equal what it takes away ; and the zest of action, the 
joy of success, the consciousness of increasing power, 
the gains of external privilege and comfort, are not 
matters of such weight as the sob of the child in the 
humid clatter of the mill. The mind of a true culture, 
a presence of fine and actual power throughout the 
South, will help her people everywhere to understand 
that culture of the deepest and broadest type, despite 
all sophistries, is never builded in violation of element- 
ary human interests ; that a prosperity which means 
the prosperity of the strong at the expense of the 
weak, carries at its heart the curse of blunted per- 
ceptions, intellectual and moral ; that if the material 
elements of progress are to outweigh the spiritual, 
and if the crude masses of democratic feeling are to 
be commercialized before they are moralized, the 
South will lose that distinctive sensitiveness of tem- 
per, that quality of charm, that generous imagination, 
that capacity for reverence, that alert and responsive 
heart, which have constituted her peculiar birthright. 
Yet the social interests of the educated life will not 
be negative alone. They cannot rest within the 
circle of corrective policies. They must press on 
into the reenforcement of those positive and affirma- 
tive proposals to which the methods of remedy and 
prevention are but contributory. What the child 
may do is of more importance than what it should 
not do. The movement against child labor, the 
movement for the relief of degrading penal con- 
ditions for adults and for children, are but an impera- 



284 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

tive part of the constructive movement — through the 
kindergartens, the schools, the churches — for freer, 
more wholesome possibilities. Through all the agen- 
cies of a positive social progress the South is rousing 
herself as never before in order that her children 
may be born into a land — not merely of greater 
wealth — but of more immediate, more abundant 
opportunity. Upon the many evidences of this 
arousal I have dwelt in previous chapters. That 
it will be sustained is clear. Yet there is no proba- 
bility that — with all its moral resources — it will too 
soon overtake its task. The vast stretches of rural 
territory (more than seventeen milHons of human 
beings living in places of less than a thousand in- 
habitants), the prevailing isolation, the few railways, 
the poor roads, the absence of strong centres of social 
organization, the remaining poverty, the comparative 
lack of diversity in industrial life, the schools, — inade- 
quate and not effectively distributed, — and last, but 
not least, the two races dividing the lands, dividing 
the churches, dividing the schools — races to whom 
coexistence seems imperative, but between whom 
coalescence would be intolerable ; here indeed is a 
task for stout hearts, a task in the presence of which 
men — if they are ever to accomplish anything — 
must learn to know, to think clearly, to be patient, 
and to love. 

Where difficulties are so great, none but the great 
and elemental human forces will prevail. It is there- 
fore of deep and hopeful significance that the power 
and influence of religious institutions is so general. 
As these come to deal more definitely and explicitly 
with the phases of social need, there will enter into 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 285 

social enthusiasms a high and serious confidence, a 
touch of authority and yet a touch of tenderness, 
which will draw the world to the Church while it 
draws the Church to the quickening and freeing of 
the world. Among civic forces the various organiza- 
tions of the women of the South are yielding an 
inspiring measure of disinterested service. An in- 
creasing commercial activity is at length touching 
almost every section of our life, inaugurating more 
varied interests and opening new possibilities to 
thought, energy, ambition. The home — the individ- 
ual American home — here, as everywhere, is the 
most intimate and most conservative of social forces. 
But it is to the school — the school in its every form, 
from the rural " primary " to the university — that our 
democracy must look, and may look, for the more 
satisfactory adjustment of the problems which ac- 
company and affect its progress. The university 
touches life less intimately and less deeply than the 
home, but more broadly and more explicitly. The 
university may not be so popular in its appeal as the 
civic club or so concrete in its influence as the busi- 
ness career, but it is more informing than the one 
and more varied, more emancipating, than the other. 
It cannot touch the soul as does the Church, it can- 
not usurp the spiritual functions or wield the directive 
and healing influence of the Christian ministry, but it 
can touch the temporal conditions of the soul more 
broadly than the Church has touched them, can in- 
vest and teach the whole body of knowledge with a 
fulness which the Church does not assume, and can 
give to the specific issues of our civil and industrial 
Hfe a clearer, more definite, more explicit criticism 



286 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap. 

than has seemed practically possible to a divided 
Christian fellowship. Under the actual conditions of 
Southern society, it may be said that the university 
may become — if it would meet the measure of its 
ideal — not only the best gift of a democracy to cul- 
ture, but the best gift of culture to our democracy. 

That it will teach knowledge — knowledge in its 
fulness and its freedom — goes without saying. But 
it may also bring, through the truth and value of the 
scholar's standpoint, the influence of perspective into 
the consideration of our Southern tasks — a perspec- 
tive in which men may see more clearly the world- 
position of the problems of Southern life, may 
understand that we are laboring with difficulties com- 
mon, in large measure, to every civilization ; that the 
South has everywhere something to teach and some- 
thing to learn, whether from the industrial history of 
Lancashire or from those points — at Ceylon, or 
Bagdad, at Johannesburg, or Algiers — where white 
men and brown and black are struggling with the 
age-long divisive fate of racial cleavage. 

The university may not only establish among us a 
clearer sense of perspective; it may help to make the 
method of political and social criticism a method of 
ideas. It may contribute to the dethronement of a 
method of popular adjudication which in many quar- 
ters of the South has long made conventions and 
conventional traditions unhappily supreme. Of these, 
many have been necessary, many have been beautiful 
and satisfying, many — just because of tender and 
compelling associations — must long remain ; and yet 
there is need that the supreme method of judgment, 
the supreme process of social and political definition, 



VIII CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY 287 

shall be more truly a method of ideas ; that fulness 
and exactness of knowledge, clearness and veracity of 
thought, truth and accuracy of statement, shall — 
along with breadth of sympathy and fertility of sug- 
gestion — take a larger place in the shaping of popu- 
lar opinion. When a great section gives itself over 
to a prolonged and exclusive emphasis upon one or 
two ideas, however true, there is danger that it may 
at length cease to have ideas. 

And yet the collective progress, the social momen- 
tum, of a huge body of democratic life is not easily 
secured except in relation to a few clear, elementary 
conceptions. These become, therefore, of such con- 
trolling and significant importance that it is all the 
more needful that they should be intelligently and 
fruitfully possessed. The developments which they 
suggest or necessitate, their broader meaning, their 
varied applications, should be discussed and inter- 
preted in an atmosphere of reverence, of sympathy, 
and yet of consistent freedom. In its contribution to 
the creation of such an atmosphere the university 
may render its most signal service. It may contribute 
to our social development not merely a sense of per- 
spective and a more vital method of social criticism, 
but it may henceforth become in our democracy an 
effective organ of its self-correction. 

If it is to be so, however, it will first become inti- 
mately, supremely human, like, at least in some 
degree, that teaching force which entered into our 
civilization nearly twenty centuries ago, as the pro- 
foundest social possession of the Western world. 
And believing, with Him, in the fertility of every 
unreclaimed or isolated province of social need, it 



288 THE PRESENT SOUTH chap, viii 

will find at length its benediction in the face of One 
who taught men democracy by His culture — who, in 
the richness and serenity of His spirit and out of that 
fulness of His interests which has been rightly called 
the fulness of His love, taught the dignity and the 
freedom of the individual heart ; who taught men cul- 
ture by His democracy — opening the fulness of truth 
through the simplicity of His faith in life, opening 
the wonder and promise of our earth from the stand- 
point of a soul giving to all knowledge the perspective 
and the dignity of imperishable use. His supreme 
gift was personal, but it has revealed an institutional 
ideal. The largest service of the university as an 
institution of culture, only arises as it comes to touch 
the enfolding and educative forces of the familiar 
world and assumes, in simplicity and sympathy, its 
more human function as supremely an institution of 
democracy. 



APPENDICES 



APPENDIX A 

STATISTICS OF POPULATION, ILLITERACY, ETC.^ 

The Twelfth Census shows that in June, 1900, there were 
in the United States 2,288,470 men of voting age (twenty-one 
years and over) who were unable to read and write. This 
was nearly 11 per cent of the total number — 21,134,299. 

At the last presidential election the total vote was 13,961,- 
566 ; and the plurality of the successful candidate was 
849,790. In the nearly 2,300,000 illiterate voters, there is 
thus no small opportunity for those who would appeal to 
the class feeHng of the ignorant. If the greater number of 
this mass of ignorant voters could be thrown to one side in 
a closely contested election, involving the national credit or 
the national honor, there would be a more vivid appreciation 
of the possibihties which they involve. 

Who are these illiterates and where are they ? Many are 
of the negro race, 976,610; but more are white, 1,249,897. 
In 1870 the greater number were negroes, 862,243 to 
748,970 white, an excess of more than 100,000. But within 
the intervening thirty years this has been changed, and now 
the white illiterates outnumber the negro by over 273,000. 

Of the white illiterates a large number are foreign-born, 
562,000; but the number of the native-born is 687,000, or 
125,000 more than the foreign-born illiterates. It appears 

1 The matter of this Appendix (A) is largely taken from the Report 
of the United States Commissioner of Education for 1902. The tables 
of statistics, I, II, III, VIII, were compiled for Chapter XVIII of 
Vol. I of that publication by Dr. George S. Dickerman of New Haven, 
Conn. Table VII is from p. Lxviii of Vol. I, and Tables IV, V, VI, 
IX, are from Vol. II. 

291 



292 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

also that the percentage of illiterates among the native- 
born sons of native parents is nearly three times as great as 
among the native-born sons of foreign parents. With the 
former it is 5.9 per cent, with the latter 2 per cent, indicat- 
ing that our schools have been reaching the children of the 
foreigner more effectively than they have reached the children 
of the native-born. Not confining ourselves to the figures 
for adult males, but taking into view the whole native white 
population ten years of age and over, we find the persistence 
of the same tendency. Even in States like New York, Penn- 
sylvania, and New Jersey the percentage of illiteracy among 
the native white population of native parentage is greater 
than among the native white population of foreign parentage.^ 

This is due to a number of causes, — chiefly, perhaps, 
to the fact that the children of the foreign-born are being 
reared largely within the cities, where schools are accessible 
and compulsory education laws enforceable, whereas the 
illiteracy among the children of the native-born is due to 
the inadequacy of school privileges among the rural popu- 
lation. And yet, the presence in our national life of 
2,288,000 iUiterate men of voting age — 618,000 of whom 
are native-born representatives of our native white popu- 
lation — may well be an occasion for serious reflection. 

In the tables which follow, Table I presents the statistics 
as to the white males of voting age, with percentage unable 
to reaei and write, classified as native of native parents, 
native of foreign parents, and foreign-born. 

Table II presents the statistics as to the negro males of 
voting age, with percentage unable to read and write, in 
1870 and in 1900. 

Table III affords a striking illustration of the fact that the 
problem of illiteracy, North as well as South, is largely rural. 
It presents the statistics as to the white males (twenty-one 
years of age and upward) with proportion unable to read 

^ See Twelfth Census of the United States, Vol. H, Table LX, p. cvi. 



STATISTICS OF POPULATION 293 

and write, classified by parentage and by their distribution 
within or without the centres of population. 

Table IV illustrates the distribution of the three elements 
of our national population in the year 1900. 

Tables V and VI indicate the progress of the several 
States in the reduction of the illiteracy of the native white 
population and of the colored population in the twenty years 
from 1880 to 1900. 

Table VII presents in close juxtaposition certain facts as 
to the distribution of population, the per capita value of 
manufactures, the relation between the adult male and the 
school population, etc. Attention is called especially to 
columns 3, 8, 12, 13. 

Table VIII presents the statistics as to the counties in 
the several States in which the proportion of white males of 
voting age, native and foreign, who cannot read and write is 
20 per cent and upward. 

Table IX indicates the rank of each State according to 
the percentage of the ilHteracy of the native white population. 

In reprinting the following illustrative material upon the 
subject of illiteracy, the author has had no desire to exagger- 
ate its significance. But, inasmuch as the statistics have 
not been easily available in popular form, it has seemed 
well to include the data in this volume. Among the many 
preoccupations of our national interest, the significance of 
our illiteracy is perhaps more likely to be ignored than to 
be exaggerated. 



294 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 





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2 

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2 


Delaware 
Maryland 

District of Columbia 
Virginia . 
West Virginia 
North Carolina 
South Carolina 
Georgia . 
Florida . 


Maine 

New Hampshire 

Vermont 

Massachusetts 

Rhode Island 

Connecticut . 

New York . 

New Jersey . 

Pennsylvania 

South Atlantic Divisi 



APPENDIX A 



295 



00 


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^ S c E 



S re c D 



296 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



TABLE II 
Negro males of voting age, with percentage unable to read 

AND write, in 1870 AND IN I9OO, BY STATES AND TERRITORIES 





Negro Males of Voting Age 




1900 


1870 




Total 


Illiterate 


Per 
cent 


Total 


Illiterate 


Per 
cent 


The United States 


2,060,302 I 


976,610 


47-4 


1,032,475 


862,243 


^L 


North Atlantic Division 


123,328 


18,808 


15-3 


48,656 


14,443 


29.7 


Maine 


445 


77 


17-3 


497 


69 


13-9 


New Hampshire 


230 


34 


14.8 


176 


38 


21.6 


Vermont 


289 


57 


19.7 


278 


45 


16.2 


Massachusetts 


10,456 


1,100 


10.5 


4,073 


822 


20.1 


Rhode Island 


2,76s 


425 


154 


1,404 


291 


20.7 


Connecticut 


4,576 


598 


I3-I 


2,700 


627 


23 2 


New York 


31,425 


3,541 


II-3 


14,586 


3.qi2 


26,8 


New Jersey 


21,474 


3,925 


18.3 


7,870 


2,881 


36.6 


Pennsylvania 


51,668 


9,051 


17-5 


17,072 


5,758 


33-7 


South Atlantic Division 


817,224 


417,400 


5I-I 


456,448 


396,437 


86.9 


Delaware 


8,374 


3,578 


42 7 


5,224 


3,765 


72.1 


Maryland 


60,406 


24,462 


40.3 


39,120 


27,123 


69-3 


District of Columbia 


23,072 


6,024 


26.1 


10,143 


7,. 599 


74-9 


Virginia 


146,122 


76,764 


52.S 


107,691 


97,908 


90.9 


West Virginia 


14,786 


5,584 


37.8 


3,972 


3,186 


80.2 


North Carolina 


127,114 


67,489 


53-1 


78,019 


68,669 


88.0 


South Carolina 


152,860 


83,618 


54-7 


85,475 


70,830 


82.9 


Georgia 


223,073 


125,710 


56.4 


107.962 


100,551 


93-1 


Florida 


61,417 


24,171 


39-4 


18,842 


16,806 


89.2 


South Central Division 


951,724 


500,093 


52.S 


461,478 


413,182 


895 


Kentucky 


74,728 


36,990 


49 5 


44,321 


37,889 


85.5 


Tennessee 


112,236 


53-396 


47.6 


64,131 


55.938 


87.2 


Alabama 


181,471 


107,997 


59 5 


97,823 


91,017 


93-0 


Mississippi 


197,936 


105,331 


532 


89,926 


80,810 


89.9 


Louisiana 


147,348 


90,262 


61.3 


86,913 


76,612 


88.1 


Texas 


136,875 


61,744 


451 


51,57s 


47,235 


gi.6 


Indian Territory 


9,146 


3,776 


41-3 


— 


— 


— 


Oklahoma 


4.827 


1,543 


32.0 


— 


— 


— 


Arkansas 


87,157 


39,054 


44.8 


26,789 


23,681 


88.4 


North Central Division 


155,701 


38,652 


24.8 


63,166 


37,434 


59-3 


Ohio 


31,235 


6,813 


21.8 


15,614 


7 531 


48.2 


Indiana 


18.186 


5,042 


27.7 


6 113 


3,182 


52 


Illinois 


29,762 


5,S5i 


187 


7,694 


3969 


516 


Michigan 


5,193 


726 


14.0 


3,130 


1,015 


324 


Wisconsin 


1,006 


128 


12.7 


642 


185 


28.8 


Minnesota 


2,168 


150 


6.9 


246 


44 


17 


9 


Iowa 


4,441 


975 


22.0 


1,542 


635 


41 


2 


Missouri 


46,418 


14,829 


31-9 


23,882 


18,002 


75 


4 


North Dakota 


IIS 


19 


16.5 


'- 28 


6 




4 


South Dakota 


184 


30 


16.3 


( 2b 






Nebraska 


2,298 


267 


11.6 


290 


93 


32 


I 


Kansas 


14,69s 


4,122 


28.1 


3,985 


2,772 


69 


6 


Western Division 


12,325 


1,657 


134 


2 727 


747 


27 


4_ 


Montana 


7H 


74 


10 4 


108 


34 


31 


5 


Wyoming 


481 


102 


21.2 


lOI 


33 


32 


7 


Colorado 


3,21s 


448 


139 


197 


63 


32 





New Mexico 


775 


126 


16.3 


8s 


58 


68 


2 


Arizona 


1,084 


120 


II. I 


18 


I 


5 


6 


Utah 


358 


17 


4-7 


36 


8 


22 


2 


Nevada 


70 


i6 


22.9 


203 


IS 


7 


4 


Idaho 


130 


20 


15-4 


38 


4 


10 


5 


Washington 


1,230 


141 


II. 5 


67 


15 


22 


3 


Oregon 


560 


53 


9-5 


143 


48 


33 


6 


California 


3,7" 


540 


14.6 


1,731 


468 


27.0 



APPENDIX A 



297 



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298 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



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inwoocNvooomo 






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u "•iS.i.J' o S S o 



APPENDIX A 



299 



mco 


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Tennessee . 
Alabama 
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Indian Territory 


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Wyoming 
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California 



300 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 






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Western Division 


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Virginia 

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North Carolina 

South Carolina 

Georgia 

Florida 


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Maine . 

New Hampshire 
Vermont 
Massachusetts 
Rhode Island 
Connecticut . 
New York . 
New Jersey . 
Pennsylvania 



APPENDIX A 



301 





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a- 1^ •* fn « t^ en 








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Maine . 
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District of C 
Virginia 
West Virgin: 
Nortli Caroli 
South Caroli 
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Florida 




to 






North Atla 
South Atla 
South Cen 
North Cen 
Western D 



APPENDIX A 



303 





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304 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



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3o6 



THE PRESENT SOUTH 



TABLE VIII 

Counties in the several States in which the proportion of 
white males of voting age, native and foreign, who can- 
not read and write, is 20 per cent and upward 





Total 


Illiter- 


Per 




Total 


Illiter- 


Per 






ate 


cent 






ate 


cent 


MAINE 








N. CAROLINA — C071. 








Aroostook 


16,271 


3.755 


23.1 


Nash . 


3,556 


814 


22.9 


KEW YORK 








Duplin . 






3,288 


758 


23.1 


Clinton . 


13,602 


3,345 


24.6 


Wilson . 
Yadkin . 






3.306 
2,830 


765 
660 


23.1 
23-3 


PENNSYLVANIA 








Sampson 






3,976 


936 


23-5 


Luzerne 


70,171 


14,029 


20.0 


Polk . 
Clay . 






1,284 


303 


23.6 














927 


220 


23-7 


VIRGINIA 








Cherokee 






2,429 


579 


23.8 


Pittsylvania . 


5:859 


1,185 


20.2 


Johnston 






5,407 


1,296 


24.0 


Smyth . 






3,755 


770 


20.6 


"Franklin 






3,068 


746 


24-3 


Wythe . 






4,016 


845 


21.0 


Haywood 






3,283 


802 


24.4 


Washington 






5,981 


1,275 


21.2 


Gates . 






1,290 


319 


24.7 


Gloucester 






1,524 


346 


22.7 


Swain . 






1,553 


394 


25-4 


Car. oil . 






3,908 


90s 


23.2 


Greene . 






1,507 


386 


25-6 


Franklin 






4,119 


975 


23.6 


Jackson 






2,360 


609 


25.8 


Lee 






4,003 


961 


24.0 


Madison 






4,074 


1,077 


26.4 


Stafford 






1,636 


397 


24.2 


Mitchell 






2,980 


816 


27.4 


Scott 






4,787 


1,193 


24.9 


Person . 






2,132 


603 


28.2 


Dickenson 






1,521 


380 


25.0 


Surry . 






5,019 


1,414 


28.2 


Russell 






3,817 


1,003 


26.2 


Yancey 






2,295 


707 


30.8 


Patrick . 






2,923 


914 


31.2 


Wilkes . 






5,081 


1,568 


30.9 


Greene . 






1,058 


331 


31-3 


Stokes . 






3,607 


1. 174 


32.5 


Buchanan 






1,957 


696 


35-6 


SOUTH CAROLINA 








WEST VIRGINIA 








Horry . 


3.553 


752 


21.2 


McDowell . 


3,700 


747 


20.2 


Pickens 


3.190 


689 


21.6 


Wyoming 






1,710 


375 


21.9 


Chesterfield . 


2,681 


702 


26.2 


Boone . 






1,725 


449 


26.0 










Lincoln 






3,336 


868 


26.0 


GEORGIA 








Mingo . 






2,617 


698 


26.7 


Murray 


1.733 


354 


20.4 


Logan . 






1,475 


405 


27-5 


Twiggs 






701 


144 


20.5 


NORTH CAROLINA 








Gilmer . 






2,104 


442 


21.0 


Hertford 


1,441 


290 


20.1 


Miller . 
Rabun . 






798 
1.234 


171 
265 


21.4 
21.5 


Rockingham 




4,903 


988 


20 


2 


Dawson 






1,040 


227 


21.8 


Macon . 






2,328 


479 


20 


6 


Paulding 






2.493 


557 


22.3 


Onslow 






2,045 


426 


20 


8 


Glascock 






666 


149 


22.4 


Lenoir . 






2,6og 


545 


20 


9 


Pickens 






1.750 


395 


22.6 


Montgomery 






2,412 


507 


21 





Fannin 






2,268 


535 


23.6 


Dare . 






1,072 


227 


21 


2 


Union . 






1,66s 


393 


23.6 


Harnett 






2,439 


517 


21 


2 


Lumpkin 






1,544 


410 


26.6 


Ashe 






3,847 


823 


21 


3 










Davie . 






2,184 


467 


21 


4 


FLORIDA 








Martin . 






1,907 


409 


21 


4 


Taylor . 


776 


194 


25.0 


Davidson 






4,515 


975 


21 


5 


Holmes 


1.389 


357 


25-7 


Pitt 






3,792 


816 


21 


5 










Watauga 






2,689 


579 


21 


5 


KENTUCKY 








Caldwell 






2,963 


646 


21 


8 


Lewis . 


4,477 


896 


20.0 


Stanly . 






2,716 


593 


21 


8 


Grayson 




4,471 


914 


20.4 


Camden 






808 


178 


22 





Menifee 




1,478 


301 


20.4 


Cleveland 






4,333 


95S 


22 


I 


Marion 




3,193 


653 


20.5 


Tyrrell . 






850 


18S 


22 


I 


Marshall 




2,582 


540 


20.9 


Burke . 






3,341 


753 


22 


5 


Allen . 




3,378 


720 


21.3 


Graham 






838 


191 


22.8 ij Johnson 




2,879 


614 


21.3 



APPENDIX A 



307 



TABLE VIII — Continued 





Total 


Illiter- 


Per 




Total 


Illiter- 


Per 






ate 


cent 






ate 


cent 


KENTUCKY — COU. 








ALABAMA 








Adair . 


3,084 


668 


21.6 


St. Clair 


3,416 


688 


20.1 


Rockcastle 




2,787 


609 


21 


9 


Winston 






1,905 


393 


20.6 


Rowan . 




1.875 


415 


22 


I 


Franklin 






3,038 


639 


21.0 


Lawrence 




4,180 


961 


23 





Chilton 






2,908 


624 


21-5 


Butler . 




3,568 


830 


23 


3 


Covington 






2,817 


612 


21.7 


Metcalfe 




2,178 


514 


23 


6 


Cherokee 






3,913 


867 


£2 2 


Bell . 




3,220 


764 


23 


7 


Cleburne 






2,644 


595 


22.5 


Carter . 




4,389 


1,046 


23 


8 


Coffee . 






3,517 


844 


24.0 


Casey . 
Wayne . 




3,365 
3,°79 


813 

746 


24 
24 


2 

2 


MISSISSIPPI 








Lee . 




1,627 


395 


24 


3 


Hancock 


1,892 


387 


20.4 


Knox . 




3,530 


861 


24 


4 


LOUISIANA 








Greenup 




3 ,497 


859 


24 


6 










Clinton 




1,667 


421 


25 


3 


West Baton Rouge 


635 


136 


21.4 


Edmonson 




2,101 


555 


26 


4 


Iberville 


2,541 


640 


25. 2 


Estill . 




2,491 


657 


26 


4 


Livingston . 




1.486 


377 


25-3 


Cumberland 




1,778 


481 


27 


I 


Point Coupee 




1,620 


442 


27.3 


Letcher 




1,777 


493 


27 


7 


Plaquemines 




1,678 


476 


28.4 


Owsley 




1,435 


397 


27 


7 


Iberia . 




3,416 


1,049 


30.7 


Jackson 




2,119 


503 


28 





St. John the Bapti 


St 


1,279 


397 


31.0 


Martin . 




1,171 


338 


28 


9 


St. Bernard . 




771 


246 


31-9 


Magoffin 




2,387 


709 


29 


7 


St. James 






2,202 


712 


32 3 


Elliott . 




2,038 


60Q 


29 


9 


St. Mary 






3,566 


1,224 


34-3 


Harlan . 




1,888 


567 


30 





Ascension 






2,755 


950 


34-5 


Floyd . 




3,074 


939 


30 


5 


Cameron 






739 


261 


35-3 


Perry . 




1,570 


493 


31 


4 


Avoyelles 






3,621 


1,443 


39-9 


Pike . 




4,462 


1,432 


32 


I 


St. Charles 






830 


332 


40.0 


Breathitt 




2,748 


890 


32 


4 


Acadia . 






4,301 


1,786 


41.5 


Clay . 




2,789 


983 


35 


2 


Lafayette 






2,863 


1,192 


41.6 


Leslie . 




1,272 


448 


35 


z 


St. Landry 






5,268 


2,305 


43-7 


Knott . 




1,561 


559 


35 


8 


St. Martin 






1,109 


986 


47.1 


TENNESSEE 








Assumption 
Terrebonne 






2,776 
3,282 


1,313 
1,627 


47-3 
49.6 


Benton . 


2,581 


526 


20.4 


Jefferson 






1,511 


752 


49.8 


Meigs . 




1,465 


307 


20.9 


Lafourche 






4,510 


2,277 


50-5 


Bledsoe 




1,377 


291 


21. 1 


Vermilion 






3,494 


1,768 


51.2 


Polk . 




2,583 


546 


21. 1 










Campbell 




3,799 


806 


21.2 


TEXAS 








Van Buren 




688 


147 


21.4 


Refugio 


285 


57 


20.0 


Marion . 




3,523 


768 


21.5 


Zavalla 






211 


45 


21.3 


Scott . 




2,257 


483 


21.5 


Wilson . 






2,880 


620 


21-5 


Union . 




2,818 


608 


21.6 


Uvalde 






I, "3 


257 


23-1 


Clay . 




1,837 


409 


22.2 


Dimmit 






303 


72 


238 


Anderson 




3,858 


866 


22.4 


Live Oak 






526 


128 


24-3 


Perry 




1,816 


407 


22.4 


McMullen 






268 


65 


24-3 


Morgan 




2,126 


476 


22.4 


Bee 






1,682 


411 


24.4 


Jackson 




3,087 


702 


22.7 


Frio 






941 


232 


24.6 


Sevier . 




4,321 


980 


22.7 


Karnes 






1,946 


525 


26.9 


Monroe 




3,815 


871 


22.8 


Jeff Davis 






323 


9' 


28.2 


Hancock 




2,217 


514 


23.2 


Atascosa 






1,519 


452 


29.8 


Grainger 




2,623 


804 


23-4 


El Paso 






7,300 


2,199 


30.1 


Unicoi . 




1,296 


314 


24.2 


Valverde 






1,449 


470 


32-4 


Cocke . 




3,803 


937 


24.6 


Brewster 






699 


229 


32.8 


Pickett 




1,132 


284 


25.1 


Kinney 






580 


193 


33-3 


Hawkins 




4,757 


1,212 


25-4 


Nueces 






2,451 


898 


36.6 


Claiborne 




4,326 


1,105 


25.6 


Maverick 






1,005 


378 


37-6 


Fentress 




1,324 


343 


25-9 


San Patricio 






577 


227 


39-3 


Macon . 




2,773 


719 


25.9 


Pecos . 






914 


367 


40.1 


Johnson 




2,130 


573 


26.9 


Ward . 






404 


162 


40.1 


Carter . 




3,588 


989 


27.6 


La Salle 






587 


236 


40.2 



3o8 



THE PRESEMT SOUTH 



TABLE Vin — Concluded 





Total 


lUiter- 


Per 




Total 


Illiter- 


Per 








cent 






ate 


cent 


TEXAS — con. 








NEW MEXICO — con. 








Reeves . 


513 


211 


41. 1 


Grant . 


4,451 


1,098 


24.6 


Zapata . 






1,128 


484 


42.9 


Sierra . 


963 


247 


25.8 


Presidio 






903 


391 


43-3 


Socorro 


3,411 


981 


2V8 


Duval . 






1,883 


862 


45-7 


San Miguel . 


5.749 


1.749 


30-4 


Webb . 






5,841 


2,874 


49.2 


ARIZONA 








Cameron 
Starr 






3,423 
2,593 


1,721 
1.369 


SO- 3 
S2.8 


Guadalupe . 


1,344 


427 


31.8 


Hidalgo 






1,522 


808 


53-1 


Valencia 
Mora . 






2,712 


819 


32.1 














2,453 


33-4 


ARKANSAS 








Rio Arriba 






3,092 


1,113 


36.0 


Randolph 


3,898 


780 


20.0 


Donna Ana 






2,818 


1.163 


41-3 


Newton 


2,608 


527 


20.2 


Apache 






538 


138 


20.4 


MISSOURI 








Graham 
Pinal . 






4,722 
1,658 


1,084 
406 


23.0 
24-5 


Washington . 


3,257 


756 


23.2 


Pima . 






3,844 


985 


2=;.6 


NEW MEXICO 








Santa Cruz 






1.347 


412 


30.6 


Union . 


1,268 


283 


22.3 


COLORADO 








Taos . 


2,974 


555 


22.4 


Huerfano 


2,269 


698 


30.8 



TABLE IX 
Showing the rank of each State in percentage of illiteracy 

OF THE native WHITE POPULATION lO YEARS OF AGE AND OVER : 
1900 



Rank 


State or Territory 


Per 
cent 


Rank 


State or Territory 


Per 
cent 


I 


Washington 


0-5 


26 


Ohio .... 


2.4 


2 


South Dakota . 






0.6 


27 


Maine 








2.4 


3 


Montana . 






0.6 


28 


Oklahoma 








2-5 


4 


Nevada 






0.6 


29 


Colorado . 








2.7 


5 


Wyoming . 






0.7 


30 


Vermont . 








2.9 


6 


Massachusetts 






0.8 


31 


Indiana 








3.6 


7 


Minnesota 






0.8 


32 


Maryland 








4.1 


8 


Nebraska 






0.8 


33 


Missouri . 








4.8 


9 


Connecticut 






0.8 


34 


Delaware . 








S.6 


10 


Oregon 






0.8 


3S 


lexas 








6.1 


II 


Utah 






0.8 


36 


Arizona 








6.2 


12 


District of Columbia 






0.8 


37 


Mississippi 








8.0 


13 


North Dakota . 






0.9 


38 


Florida . 








8.6 


14 


Idaho 






0.9 


39 


West Virginia 








10.0 


IS 


California . 






I.O 


40 


Virginia . 








II. I 


16 


New York 






1.2 


41 


Arkansas . 








11.6 


17 


Iowa 






1.2 


42 


Georgia . 








11.9 


18 


Wisconsin 






1-3 


43 


Kentucky 








12.8 


19 


Kansas 






1-3 


44 


South Carolina 






13.6 


20 


New Hampshire 






1-5 


45 


Indian Territory 






14.0 


21 


Micliigan . 






1-7 


46 


Tennessee 






14.2 


22 


New Jersey 






1-7 


47 


Alabama . 






14.8 


23 


Rhode Island . 






1.8 


48 


Louisiana 






17-3 


24 


Illinois 






2.1 


49 


North Carolina 






19-5 


25 


Pennsylvania . 






2.3 


SO 


New Mexico . 






29.4 



APPENDIX B 

CHILD LABOR IN ALABAMA i 

A CORRESPONDENCE 

A Discussion of New England's Part in the Common 
Responsibility for the Child-labor Conditions of 
THE South 

In the summer of the year 1901 the Executive Committee 
on Child Labor in Alabama observed, in the New England 
press, certain criticisms of the child-labor conditions of the 
South. Knowing that the South was not alone at fault, and 
that Eastern men have been partly responsible for the failure 
of child-labor legislation in the Southern States, the Com- 
mittee addressed a public statement of the facts to the 
people and the press of New England. 

The object of this statement was to awaken the public 
opinion of New England in order that this opinion might 
operate to control — not the South — but the New England 
man who is doing at the South what he cannot and dare not 
do at home. 

A Reply to the Committee 

On Wednesday, October 30, the following communica- 
tion appeared in the Evening Transcript of Boston, Massa- 
chusetts. 

To the Editor of the Transcript : 

My attention has been called to an article in your paper of the 
23d inst., signed by gentlemen from Alabama, in reference to 
child labor. 

1 A reprint of one of the series of pamphlets circulated by the Ala- 
bama Committee in behalf of factory legislation. 

309 



3IO THE PRESENT SOUTH 

As treasurer of a mill in that State, erected by Northern capi- 
tal, I am interested in the subject. From the starting of our 
mill, I have never been South without protesting to the agent, 
and overseer of spinning (the only department in which small 
help can be employed), against allowing children under twelve 
years of age to come into the mill, as I did not consider them 
intelligent enough to do good work. On a visit last June, 
annoyed that my instructions were not more carefully observed, 
before leaving I wrote the agent a letter of which the following 
is a copy : — 

"Every time I visit this mill, I am impressed with the fact 
that it is a great mistake to employ small help in the spinning 
room. Not only is it wrong from a humanitarian standpoint but 
it entails an absolute loss to the mill. We prepare the stock and 
make it into roving, and, because of the small spinners, send 
back to the pickers an exxessive amount of roving waste, and 
meantime lose the work of the spindles. I again express the 
wish that you prevent the overseer, as far as possible, from 
employing children under twelve years of age. I know it is 
sometimes difficult to get at the real age — and in some cases 
the parents may threaten to leave our employ unless we give 
work to their small children, but we must take this stand — and 
I trust an honest effort will be made to carry out my wishes." 

In defence of our officials, it is doubtless true that the trouble 
comes largely from the parents, who make every effort to get 
their children into the mill, and often because of refusal, take 
their families containing needed workers, to other mills, where 
no objection is made to the employment of children. The state- 
ment that twice as many children under twelve years of age are 
employed in mills under Northern control as in Southern mills, 
if it means, as it should, in proportion to spindles on same num- 
ber of yarns, is absolutely false so far as relates to our company, 
and I have reason to believe the same can be said of other mills 
under Northern ownership. 

Now in regard to the attempted legislation of last winter: 
The labor organizations at the North imported from England a 
very bright and skilful female labor agitator and sent her to 
Alabama. She held meetings at central points, and when the 
Legislature convened appeared at Montgomery with her following, 



APPENDIX B 311 

and a bill against employing children was promptly introduced. 
The manufacturers and other business men of Alabama resented 
this outside interference, well knowing the source from which it 
came, and they were also aware that manufacturers at the North 
were being solicited for funds with which to incite labor troubles 
in the South. 

As they recognized that this bill was only the entering wedge, 
they determined that action must come from within the State, 
and not outside. They also felt that the adjoining State of 
Georgia, having double the number of spindles, should act first. 
With these considerations in mind, the manufacturers selected 
among others our agent, a native Alabamian, to appear before the 
legislative committee, with the result that the bill was defeated. 
I think it may be said with truth, that the interference of Northern 
labor agitators is retarding much needed legislation in all the 
manufacturing States of the South. 

As to our mill and the little town of 2300 people which has 
grown up around it, there is nothing within the mill or without, 
of which any citizen of Massachusetts need be ashamed. On 
the contrary, I challenge either of the gentlemen from Alabama 
whose names are attached to the letter referred to, to mention 
among the forty mills in the State, of which only four are directly 
operated from the North, any one which will compare with ours, 
in the expenditure which has been made for the comfortable 
housing of the operatives, and the appliances introduced for their 
comfort and uplift. From the inception of this enterprise, the 
purpose has been to build up a model town that should be an 
object lesson to the South, and we are assured that its influences 
have been helpful. In addition to a school supported by public 
tax, the company has always carried on a school of its own, with 
an experienced and devoted teacher, who has been instructed to 
make special effort to get in the young children, and thus allure 
them from the mill. We have built and have in operation a 
beautiful library — the first erected for this special purpose in the 
State of Alabama, and we have a church building which would 
be an ornament in any village of New England, and is in itself 
an education to our people. We are now building a modern 
schoolhouse from plans by Boston architects which will accom- 
modate all the children of our community. These are a few of 



312 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

the things we have done and are doing, in our effort to meet the 
responsibility we have assumed, in dealing with a class of people 
who have some most excellent traits, and who appeal to us strongly, 
because many of them have hitherto been deprived of needed 
comforts and largely of elementary advantages. 

What we are attempting to do for our operatives may seem to 
the gentlemen who signed the appeal in your columns as " spec- 
tacular philanthropy " and a " heartless policy " ; but this is not 
the opinion of our employees, nor of visitors who have acquainted 
themselves with the facts, nor of the communities adjacent to us. 

J. Howard Nichols, 
Treasurer Alabama City Mill, Alabama. 

A Rejoinder from Alabama 

On the afternoon of November 2d, Mr. Edgar Gardner 
Murphy, of Montgomery, Alabama, the chairman of the 
Alabama Child-labor Committee, received a copy of the 
above letter. Mr. Murphy at once wrote and forwarded 
the following rejoinder : — 

To the Editor of the Transcript : 

I note in your issue of October 30th a reply to a statement to 
the press and the people of New England, on the subject of child 
labor in Alabama. Our statement bore the signatures of six^ 
representative citizens of Alabama, among them the Superin- 
tendent of Public Schools of Birmingham and ex-Governor 
Thomas G. Jones, of Montgomery. The reply to the address 
of the committee is signed, not by a disinterested citizen of the 
State, but by Mr. J. Howard Nichols, Treasurer of the Alabama 
City Mill, at Alabama City. 

1 The full membership of the Alabama Committee was, at a later 
date, as follows : Judge J. B. Gaston, Dr. B. J. Baldwin, Rev. Neal L. 
Anderson, Judge Thos. G. Jones, S. B. Marks, Jr., Judge W. H, Thomas, 
Father O'Brien, and Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Montgomery ; John 
Craft, Erwin Craighead, Jos. E. Rich, of Mobile ; (the Hon. Richard 
H. Clarke was a member of the local committee at Mobile) ; and A. J. 
Reilly, Rev. John G. Murray, Hon. A. T. London, and Dr. J. H. 
Phillips, Superintendent of Schools, of Birmingham. 



APPENDIX B 313 

I thank you for publishing Mr. Nichols's letter. The well- 
known citizens of Alabama with whom I have the honor to be 
associated, have welcomed the discussion of this subject, and they 
desire the frankest and fullest showing of the facts. 

I note, however, with some amazement, that the Treasurer of 
the Alabama City Mill begins his argument by conceding the 
two fundamental principles for which we are contending — the 
social wrong and the economic error of child labor under twelve. 
He declares that from the starting of that mill he has repeatedly 
protested against the use of children under this age and that last 
June he wrote to his local agent that the employment of such 
help " is not only wrong from a humanitarian standpoint, but it 
entails an absolute loss to the mill." Now this is substantially, 
and in admirable form, the whole case of our committee. 

Yet what must be our added amazement when, in the next 
paragraph but one, we read the further admission that, in order 
to continue this economic and social wrong and in order to defeat 
a simple and effective remedy for this wrong, the salaried repre- 
sentative of his own mill, during the preceding February, had 
appeared in this city before our Legislature, in aggressive and 
persistent antagonism to the protection of little children under 
twelve ! This, in the teeth of protests which Mr. Nichols declares 
he has made since "the starting" of his mill. Who, then, is the 
responsible representative of the actual policy of the Alabama 
City Mill — its Treasurer or its representative before the Legis- 
lature? Or is the policy of the mill a policy which concedes the 
principle, only to deny the principle its fruit ? If this be the true 
interpretation of the conditions, what are we to say to the explana- 
tions which are suggested ; explanations offered '• in defence of 
our [Mr. Nichols's] officials." 

Mr. Nichols assures us that the officials have been put under 
grave pressure from the parents. Let us concede that this is 
true. Yet Mr. Nichols himself is not satisfied with this " defence," 
and he declares wisely and bravely that his officials must take 
their stand against the pressure of unscrupulous and idle parents. 
His agents must resist the threat of such parents to leave the 
Alabama City Mill for mills having a lower standard of employ- 
ment. Does not Mr. Nichols see that our legislation was pre- 
cisely directed toward ending this pressure, toward breaking up 



314 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

this ignoble competition, and toward tlie preservation of the 
standard of employment which he professes ? There could be 
no pressure to withdraw the children and to enter them in other 
mills, if such labor were everywhere prohibited by statute. But 
we are grateful to iVIr. Nichols for his declaration. And yet, is he 
ignorant of the need of legislation in the State at large ? His 
very argument is a confession of knowledge. If the Alabama 
City Mill is fairly represented by the profession of Mr. Nichols, 
why should the paid and delegated agent of that mill labor here 
for weeks to thwart a simple legislative remedy for the abuses he 
deplores ? 

Is it sufficient for your correspondent to declare that this leg- 
islation met with local oioposition simply because such reforms 
should come "from within the State and not from outside"? 
This is a strange objection upon the part of one who represents 
investments from outside. The evils may be supported from the 
East, but the remedies (sic) must be indigenous ! Nor is there 
the slightest ground for the suggestion that the initiative for our 
movement of reform came from " a skilful female labor agitator 
imported from England." We yield sincere gratitude to the 
American Federation of Labor for their earnest, creditable, and 
effective cooperation. Their interest in the situation is entirely 
intelligible. When the younger children are thrust into the labor 
market in competition with the adult, they contend that the adult 
wage is everywhere affected. But the agent of the Federation of 
Labor — earnest and devoted woman that she is — did her work, 
not in the spirit of interference, but in the spirit of helpfulness. 
She was not responsible for the beginning of the agitation. The 
demand for this legislative protection of our children was made 
by the Ministers' Union of Montgomery and by the Woman's 
Christian Temperance Union of Alabama, before she was ever 
heard of in the South. 

Nothing could be more baseless than the assumption that our 
local effort for reforms is due to outside forces. But if it were 
— what of it ? There is at stake here to-day the welfare of our 
little children, the happiness and efficiency of our future opera- 
tives, the moral standard of our economic life ; and this committee 
frankly proposes, in every honorable way, to secure all the aid, 
from every quarter of our common country, which we can possibly 



APPENDIX B 315 

command. The criticism of such a policy is a little out of place 
from the representative of a mill here operated upon investments 
from Massachusetts. 

Mr. Nichols then informs us that the reform legislation was 
defeated because '■ the adjoining State of Georgia, having double 
the number of spindles, should act first." This, we have con- 
tended, is to miss the very essence of the statesmanship of the 
situation. The very fact that Georgia has twice as many spindles 
as Alabama, makes it twice as hard for Georgia to precede us. 
The cost of such an economic readjustment must be obviously 
twice as great in Georgia as in Akibama. That Alabama is not 
so deeply involved in the system of child labor as some other 
Southern States is clearly the reason why Alabama should take 
the lead. 

It has been conservatively estimated that in some of the South- 
ern States more than twenty per cent of the mill operatives are 
under fourteen years of age. Does Mr. Nichols wish Alabama 
to delay until that becomes the condition of the industry in this 
State? According to the logical demand of his argument, the 
State having the most spindles, the State most deeply and inex- 
tricably involved, must be the first to face the delicate and difficult 
problem of readjustment ! 

Mr. Nichols also declares that our reform measure was defeated 
because it was believed to be '" the entering wedge " of other 
troublesome labor legislation. We must not protect our little 
children under twelve, we must not do a compassionate and 
reasonable thing, because, forsooth, somebody might then de- 
mand an inconsiderate and unreasonable thing ! Do the corpo- 
rate interests in Alabama wish to predicate their liberties upon 
such an argument ? 

Yet, says Mr. Nichols, '* with these considerations in mind, the 
manufacturers selected, among others, our agent, a native Ala- 
bamian, to appear before the Legislative Committee, with the re- 
sult that the bill was defeated." Mr. Nichols neglects to state 
that on the second hearing of the bill, his agent appeared alone 
as the chosen spokesman of all the opponents of reform. He, too, 
made much of this hoary scare about " the entering wedge." 

What iniquities of reaction, what bitter stultification of human 
progress has that argument not supported ! In such a case as 



3i6 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

this, it is not an argument, it is a provocation. It is a challenge 
to the common sense and the common humanity of our people. 
If the corporate interests of this State, whether operated by North- 
erners or Southerners, are to rest the great cause of their unre- 
stricted development upon the cruel refusal of protection to our 
younger children, then let them beware lest, having rejected " the 
entering wedge," they invite the cyclone. What greater folly, 
viewed from the strictly selfish standpoint of certain corporate 
interests, than to involve their fate in the issues of so odious an 
argument? 

Such a course must gradually invite the hatred of the people, 
must inevitably goad the great masses of our population into the 
fixed belief that the corporation desires to live, not by production, 
but through destruction ; that it is a force to be feared and bound 
rather than a force to be trusted and liberated. The course of 
humanity is always the course of wisdom. If the corporate in- 
terests of this State desire a long and prosperous career, untram- 
melled by restrictive legislation, let them disabuse the people of 
the impression that their liberties represent the refusal of com- 
passion to our children ; let them persuade the people of Alabama 
that they wish to grow, not out of the soil of ignorance and 
wretchedness, but out of the rich and human fertilities of social 
justice and the social welfare. Let them go to the popular heart, 
and base themselves there, not upon the negation, but upon the 
e.xtension of privilege. 

I concur in the claim that the Alabama City Mill is in some 
respects wholly exceptional. Says Mr. Nichols: "I challenge 
either of the gentlemen from Alabama to mention among the 
mills of the State . . . any one which compares with ours in 
the expenditure which has been made for the comfortable housing 
of the operatives and the appliances introduced for their comfort 
and uplift." In one breath the friends of this mill ask us to be- 
lieve it exceptional, and yet in the next breath they ask that the 
need for reform legislation in relation to all the mills of the State, 
shall be determined from the conditions it presents! If the Ala- 
bama City Mill is so unique, then it is not representative or typi- 
cal. If it is not representative of the average conditions of child 
labor in Alabama, it has nothing to do with this argument. 

As to the proportionate number of little children in our South- 



APPENDIX B 317 

ern and Northern mills, the facts have been accurately stated by 
the committee. The statement of Mr. Nichols that there are 
only four mills in the State " directly operated from the North " 
is unintelligible to me. Upon my desk, as I write, there are the 
figures from eleven Alabama mills which, upon the word of their 
own managers, are controlled by Northern capital. 

It seems to have grieved Mr. Nichols that we should have 
characterized certain unique philanthropies in connection with 
one or two of our Eastern mills as ''spectacular." The gentle- 
men of this committee have no desire to express themselves 
in the language of impulsive epithet. We are sincerely grateful 
for every motive and for every work which touches and blesses 
the lot of the unprivileged. But when large photographs of the 
exceptional philanthropies of a single mill are seriously brought 
before the committee of our Legislature as an argument for the 
perpetuation of the general conditions of child labor in this State, 
when the advertisements of a unique establishment are used to 
cloak the wretched lot of the average factory ; when, upon the 
basis of the representations of Alabama City, men are taught to 
ignore the essential cruelty of the whole miserable system, and 
are made blind to the misery of hundreds whom that factory can 
never touch, then I frankly declare that such philanthropies are 
indeed "spectacular," for they have actually cursed more than 
they have ever blessed. They have become a mockery of love. 
They may have benefited the employees of one mill ; but they 
have served to rivet the chains of a heart-breaking and wretched 
slavery upon hundreds of our little children in the State at large. 
And no philanthropy, however exceptional, and no institutional 
compassion, however effective, can ever justify the refusal, at the 
door of the factory, of legislative protection to the little child 
under twelve years of age. That is the sole contention of this 
committee. 

Is that asking too much ? If Massachusetts protects at four- 
teen years, may not Alabama protect at twelve? Is this too 
drastic a demand upon the exceptional philanthropy of the mill 
at Alabama City? I hope not. I do not mean to write with the 
slightest personal unkindness, but I do write with an intense 
earnestness of concern in behalf of the sad and unnatural fate of 
the little people of our factories. We, for their sakes, do not 



3i8 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

want enemies anywhere. We want friends everywhere. It is 
with pleasure therefore that I recur to the instructions forwarded 
by Mr. Nichols to his agent. Speaking of the employment of 
little children, he said, " Not only is it wrong from a humanita- 
rian standpoint, but it entails an absolute loss to the mill." There 
speaks the man of wisdom and the man of heart. Does Mr. 
Nichols mean it? Does the mill at Alabama City mean it? Will 
Massachusetts join hands with Alabama? 

That mill, with its great influences, has led the fight in this 
State against the protection of our factory children. Will it con- 
tinue to represent a policy of opposition and reaction? Or, will 
it represent a policy of cooperation and of progress? Will it 
send its representative, with this committee, before our next 
Legislature and there declare that the cotton industry of the 
South, as here undertaken by Massachusetts, is too important in 
its dignity and its value to be longer involved in the odium and 
the horror of an industrial system which all the world has cast 
off? If so, that representative may indeed find himself in the 
company of some of the nobler forces from "outside." The 
whole world has a way of taking the little child to its heart. But 
he will also find himself in the company — the increasingly reso- 
lute company — of thousands of the people of Alabama. 

Edgar Gardner Murphy. 

Montgomery, Ala., November 2, 1901. 

Another Reply to the Committee 

The following letter, in reply to the statement of Ala- 
bama's Executive Committee, is from Mr. Horace Sears, of 
Boston. The communication first appeared in the Evening 
Trajiscript, of Boston, and was reprinted in the December 
issue of the Monthly Leader — the organ of the Christian 
Social Union. It appeared as follows in the Leader : — 

Editor the Leader : 

It would be difficult to think that such misleading statements 
as those which appeared under the communication entitled, 
" Child Labor in Alabama," were intended seriously, were it not 
for the importance of the subject and the evident stress of feeling 



APPENDIX B 319 

under which its authors labored. Such appeals do far more 
to hinder than to help the welfare of the children, which many 
manufacturers have more truly at heart than have the professional 
labor agitator and the well-meaning but ill-advised humanitarian. 

But I have read with interest, and wish to indorse throughout, 
the thoughtful and dispassionate reply to this appeal in your issue 
of October 30 by Mr. J. Howard Nichols, treasurer of the Ala- 
bama City Mill. In the Hght of his statement, a statement with 
which I, in common with most manufacturers, agree, that the 
employment of child labor is not only " wrong from a humani- 
tarian standpoint, but entails absolute loss to the mill," the fervid 
rhetoric of the executive committee " of the exploitation of child- 
hood for the creation of dividends " seems just a little strained. 

If, instead of giving utterance to sentimental heroics and berat- 
ing those who are in no wise responsible for, but are trying to 
better, these conditions (which conditions are not nearly as de- 
plorable as this over-wrought appeal would indicate), the execu- 
tive committee would join the manufacturers in trying to obtain 
remedial legislation that would strike at the root of the trouble, 
and to awaken a deeper sense of parental responsibility, much 
would be gained towards improving the industrial system as far 
as it affects the employment of children in the cotton mills of the 
South. 

At the hearing before the legislative committee at Montgomery 
last winter (which I am constrained to believe none of this execu- 
tive committee attended or they would have a more intelligent 
conception of the situation to-day), the president of our mill 
joined with other manufacturers in urging that the Legislature 
pass a compulsory education law. If such a law were passed and 
then adequately enforced after enactment, it would be impossible 
for the children to work in the mills for a large part of the year, 
a condition which most manufacturers would welcome as gladly 
as the executive committee. As it is, no mill can afford, as 
Mr. Nichols states, to lose some of its most desirable and skil- 
ful operatives, through the parents' insisting that their children 
be given employment to swell the family revenues, and removing 
to a mill that will grant such employment, if the mill where they 
are located refuses to do so. At our mill the superintendent has 
sometimes taken this risk, and refused to allow children to work 



320 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

unless the parents would first agree to have them attend school 
for a part of the term at least. All possible pressure is brought 
to bear to get the children into school, but many will not go at 
all of their own volition, neither will their parents always require 
it. And without a compulsory education law we know they are 
better off in the mill than running wild in the streets and fields, 
exposed to the danger of growing up into an ignorant, idle, and 
vicious citizenship. 

Any compulsory education law which is passed, however, should 
be made operative only upon the passage of similar laws by the 
States of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Other- 
wise it would be prejudicial to the interests of Alabama as a cotton 
manufacturing State and make it very difficult for the mills to 
retain some of their best and most skilful hands. While I 
doubt not that the people of New England would be glad, as 
always, to do anything in their power for the elevation of the 
toiling masses, especially of the children, and for the amelioration 
of any adverse conditions that surround them, yet there is little 
in this instance that they can do, except to advise our friends in 
Alabama, who have interested themselves in the matter, to culti- 
vate a calm and judicial mind, study the situation with intelligence 
and wise discrimination, and then act under the responsibility 
which they state that they feel rests upon them. Nor can they do 
better than to follow the lead of Massachusetts, which long ago 
successfully grappled with the problem, by 

1st — Awakening a sense of parental responsibility, so that 
parents will deny themselves and make any reasonable sacrifice to 
win an education for their children. 

2d — The enactment of a compulsory education law. 

3d — Its energetic enforcement. 

The statement that the actual number of children employed in 
mills representing Northern investments is twice as great as in the 
mills controlled by Southern capital is unworthy of attention. I 
challenge its accuracy, and deplore the partisan spirit which leads 
to such an unfounded accusation. 

The executive committee appears to include representatives of 
the Church, the school, and the State. Let me call their attention 
to the fact that many of the families who are now happy in their 
work and growing into finer manhood and womanhood at the 



APPENDIX B 321 

mills, came from isolated and distant homes where the Church and 
the school never reached them, and where the State was felt only 
through its unsympathetic and restraining, although necessary, 
laws. Through the opportunity which the mills have offered, and 
under their watchful and sympathetic care, many a community has 
been built up and surrounded with Christianizing, educational, and 
civilizing influences, that the Church, the school, and the State 
would never have been able to throw around them. 

Although our mill village is provided with a church which was 
built at the expense of the mill in its very inception, with schools 
supported in part by the State, in part by the parents, and in part 
by the mill, whose superintendent is instructed to see that the tuition 
of every child desiring to attend school is paid by the mill if not 
otherwise provided for, with an assembly hall, a library, and a 
reading room, it did not occur to us that this was "spectacular 
philanthropy," for we neither knew nor cared whether it came to 
the notice of the outside world, save as it would influence other 
corporations to do likewise. Indeed, we do not consider it philan- 
thropy at all, but simply rendering willing service in our turn to 
those who are faithfully serving us. 

The neighboring factory village at Lanett, Ala., is similarly pro- 
vided for at the expense and under the fostering care of the Lanett 
Cotton Mill, and my personal observation and knowledge lead me 
to believe that instead of one or two mills of a " spectacular 
philanthropy," the majority of the mills throughout the South, and 
especially those under Northern management, have, without any 
appeal to the galleries, quietly and gladly given their operatives 
and their families all desired privileges of church and school and 
social and literary life, that were not already offered by the town 
in which they were located. 

Turning from the appeal of the executive committee, a picture 
arises before me of the peaceful, happy mill settlement at Lang- 
dale, with its pretty church filled to the doors on Sundays with an 
attentive. God-fearing congregation, with its large and enthusiastic 
Sunday-school, with its fine school and kindergarten department, 
with its well-selected library of over 1000 volumes, with its pleas- 
ant reading room open every week-day evening, with its assembly 
hall often filled with an audience attracted by a programme of the 
debating club, or the literary society, or the entertainment com- 

Y 



322 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

mittee, with its streets lighted by electricity, and with the mill 
agent and his beloved wife going in and out among the homes of 
the people, participating in all their joys and sorrows ; and know- 
ing that this is typical of many another manufacturing village in 
the South, especially of those under Northern management or con- 
trolled by Northern capital, I rub my eyes and wonder whether 
the animus of this appeal of the executive committee is that of 
ignorance, or of mischievous labor agitation, or of sectional hatred, 
which we had hoped was long since deservedly laid away in its 
grave-clothes. Horace S. Sears, 

Treasurer of the West Point Manufacturing 
Company, Langdale, Ala. 

On reading the above communication, Mr. Murphy, the 
Chairman of the Alabama Executive Committee, repHed as 
follows : — 

A Rejoinder to Mr. Sears 

To the Editor of the Monthly Leader : 

A number of the considerations presented by Mr. Horace S. 
Sears I have dealt with in my reply to Mr. J. Howard Nichols. 
This reply was published in the Evening Transcript of Boston, 
and I will gladly forward a copy of it to any of your readers upon 
receipt of a postal card request. 

There are, however, a few additional suggestions in the letter 
of Mr. Sears. 

He contends that, while " the employment of little children is 
not only wrong from a humanitarian standpoint, but entails abso- 
lute loss to the mill," yet Alabama should not provide any legis- 
lative protection for her children under twelve, until the State 
can be won to the acceptance of a compulsory education law. In 
other words, we are not to attempt a possible reform until we 
have first secured another reform which every practical man in 
Alabama knows is just now impossible. 

But granting that Mr. Sears is right, and admitting that Massa- 
chusetts may fairly labor to defeat one method of reform because 
Alabama will not adopt another, is Mr. Sears really ready for 
his remedy? Not by any means. If our Executive Committee 
should adopt his advice, should abandon its own conception of 



APPENDIX B 323 

the statesmanship of the situation, and should "join the manu- 
facturers " in first assisting upon a comprehensive scheme of com- 
pulsory education, would the forces represented by Mr. Sears 
stand by the compact? Not for a moment! He is quite frank 
in his disavowal of any such intention. Says Mr. Sears, " any 
compulsory education law which is passed, however, should be 
operative only upon the passage of similar laws by the States of 
Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina." 

This enthusiasm for reform, only on condition that all the 
rest of the world will reform too, is very familiar to the students 
of economic progress. Over in Georgia and the Carolinas, some 
of the mill men are claiming that they " are only waiting upon 
Alabama." And there you are ! 

The suggestion from Mr. Sears that the members of our Com- 
mittee were not present at the legislative hearings last winter is, 
I think, unworthy of this discussion. If Mr. Sears was there 
himself, he knows that one of the members of our Committee 
was Chairman of the Legislative Committee of the lower House 
which had the Child-labor Bill under consideration, that he pre- 
sided at the public hearing on this bill given by the joint Com- 
mittee of both Houses, and that he was personally in charge of 
the compulsory education bill (which Mr. Sears claims to have 
favored) ; that the writer of these lines appeared in behalf of 
the Child-labor Bill at both hearings ; that those who fought 
our Child-labor law selected, as the most prominent man in 
Alabama whom they could get to oppose us, the State''s most 
conspicuous opponent of compulsory education ; and that the 
representative of Massachusetts investments who so vigorously 
fought the proposed legislative protection of our children, took 
no part whatever in the public discussion of the bill for compul- 
sory education. 

Moreover, Mr. Sears neglects to state that the compulsory edu- 
cation law, which he declares the president of his mill supported, 
owed its origin not to Massachusetts, nor to the mills, but to the 
same devoted woman whom Mr. Nichols condemns as " a .skilful 
female labor agitator imported from England," which description 
Mr. Sears approves! In other words, the very remedy which 
Mr. Sears suggests with such commendable unction was offered 
to Alabama, not by the forces of Massachusetts, nor by the mills, 



324 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

but by the forces which Mr. Sears has so persistently opposed 
and which he ventures to charge with "sentimental heroics." 

At the hearings upon the compulsory education bill I was not 
personally present, for, realizing the utter futility of then placing 
our dependence upon the practical cooperation of the mill men, I 
knew the bill was doomed. But other members of our Commit- 
tee were untiring in its support, and had the mill forces expended 
one-fifth of the energy in favor of this bill that they expended in 
opposition to our Child-labor Bill, the compulsory education 
measure might at least have been put upon its passage. 

In the face of such facts and in the face of all the convenient 
conditions suggested, under which "any compulsory education 
law should be made operative only upon the passage of similar 
laws by the States of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Caro- 
lina," it is not strange that suspicion should be abroad, and that 
some of our reform forces should have adopted the opinion that 
all this strenuous talk about compulsory education is but part of 
an attempt to block a reform which is possible, by the safe pro- 
posal of a reform which is impossible — that the effort is simply 
a neat and effective element in the diplomacy of estoppel. 

Is the suspicion totally unfounded? I do not doubt that, in 
the hearts of some, the proposal is sincere. Those who are not 
face to face with our local conditions, may think compulsory edu- 
cation a practical alternative. But that the representative of the 
cotton mill, the representative of the system of child labor in 
this State, should sincerely advocate a policy of compulsory edu- 
cation, is something which many of our hard-headed, sensible 
people cannot understand. These people are confronted, not 
merely by a few exceptional mills, but by the average conditions 
of the child-labor system. They see little children under 
twelve, sometimes as 3'oung as six, working eight and twelve and 
thirteen hours a day — sometimes sent into the mills at night; 
they see the burden and the wretchedness of this system ; and 
they cannot see how a man who is identified with such conditions 
can be sincerely an advocate of the system of compulsory edu- 
cation — and for the very obvious reason that he himself, in 
supporting the child-labor system of Alabama, is manifestly 
supporting a system of compulsory ignorance. 

" But," Mr. Sears may say, '' it is not true that I am identified 



APPENDIX B 325 

with such conditions. Our mill is a good mill." The claim can- 
not stand. I am not prepared to charge the darkest conditions 
upon the mills controlled by Massachusetts, but I do contend 
that when the representatives of the Massachusetts mills, upon 
their own published confession, unite in public opposition to 
legislative reform for our abuses, when they themselves continue 
to oppose the legislative protection of children under twelve, and 
when they are actually employing hundreds of such children, 
then they are morally responsible for the general evils which 
they have labored to continue. We must have the aid of the 
law, not primarily for the good mill, but for the bad mill, just as 
every community needs a law against theft, not to protect it from 
the honest, but from the dishonest. In urging this suggestion 
upon our many friends in New England, I ask them to realize 
that any factory here, whatever its advantages, stands intimately 
related to the whole industrial system of the State. There are 
true men and true women associated with some of these factories. 
But the effort of the good mill to prevent the legislative protection 
of children under twelve, means, in its effect, the continuation of 
the present conditions in the worst mills of the State. Kindness 
may modify the evils of child labor in one mill without legisla- 
tion, yet nothing but legislation will enable us to protect the 
child which has fallen into the hands of the unkind. 

I am personally of the opinion that there is no mill on earth 
good enough to be permitted to work a little child under twelve 
years of age, but, if there be such a mill and if that mill be con- 
trolled by brave and good men, it will make its sacrifices and will 
put forth its labors, not only to continue the supposed good for- 
tune of the few, but to avert the pitiable misfortunes of the many. 

New England might find analogies in our situation. Was 
New England solicitous for the policy of "non-interference" 
from outside the State, in relation to the evils of slavery? Yet 
Mr. Nichols and Mr. Sears do not wish anybody outside of Ala- 
bama to take an interest in the local question of child labor ! 
More than a generation ago it was argued, for the system of slav- 
ery, that there were good plantations upon which the slaves were 
well treated. The statement was true, but the argument was 
weak. The presence of the good plantation could not offset the 
perils and evils of the system in itself, any more than the " good 



326 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

factory " can justify the system of child labor. The need for any 
social or economic reform may never be determined from the 
conditions presented by the best phases of a system, but from 
the essential genius of the system, and from the average condi- 
tions wrhich it presents. The very idea of enforced labor for the 
child under twelve is monstrous, both from a moral and an eco- 
nomic standpoint. The very essence of the system, as with the 
system of slavery, is an error. There can be no "good" child 
labor. And this system is monstrous, not only in principle, but 
in results. 

Mr. Sears is sure that we have exaggerated the evil of these re- 
sults. I would respectfully ask, who are the more likely to make 
accurate report of the results — Mr. Sears and Mr. Nichols, living 
in Boston and directly interested in the system they defend, or a 
representative committee of seven men who are passing their lives 
in Alabama and who have no financial connection whatever, direct 
or indirect, with the system they attack ? Among these men are 
Dr. Phillips, the Superintendent of Public Schools at Birming- 
ham, and ex-Governor Thos. G. Jones, lately selected by Presi- 
dent Roosevelt for the Federal bench (although a Democrat) 
upon the ground of his breadth of learning, his sterling integ- 
rity, and his judicial capacity and temper. It is hardly neces- 
sary for Mr. Sears to accuse such men of " sentimental heroics " 
or to exhort such men " to cultivate ^a xalm and judicial mind 
and to study the situation with intelligence and wise discrimina- 
tion." 

Let us take another of the issues of fact. Mr. Sears, in urging 
a compulsory education law and in opposition to a child-labor 
law, declares in support of his mill, that "all possible pressure is 
brought to bear to get the children into school, but many will 
not go at all of their own volition, neither will their parents 
always require it." The impression is created even upon the 
mind of the editor of the Leader (in whose large-heartedness I 
have every confidence) that present conditions are possibly better 
than they would be under the law proposed by the Committee. 
This rather ignores the fact that the law proposed by the Com- 
mittee had an admirable educational provision — as good a pro- 
vision as we thought it possible to pass. But, is it true that these 
children are stubbornly opposed to education? Conditions vary. 



APPENDIX B 327 

No man can speak for the children of every mill in Alabama. 
Yet, as Mr. Sears has told about the children in one factory. I 
will tell of those in another. The mill is less than twenty miles 
from my study. There are about seventy-five children in it. 
They are worked twelve hours out of twenty-four, from 6 a.m. to 
6.30 P.M., allowing a half-hour for dinner. Last year they were 
refused a holiday, even on Thanksgiving. A night school, taught 
by volunteers, has been opened near them, through those whom 
Mr. Sears has called '' well-meaning but ill-advised humani- 
tarians." 1 have watched the experiment with some hesitation, 
because the teaching is real teaching and I am not sure that any 
child, after twelve hours of work, should be wearied with much 
of an effort at education. But fifty children out of the seventy- 
five are flocking into this school voluntarily, eager to learn, and 
disappointed when the crowded session is brought to its early 
end. Now, which law is the more needed by these children — a 
provision for compulsory education, or a provision which will 
strike at the system of compulsory ignorance surrounding them ; 
which will close for them the door of the mill, and open to them 
the opportunities of knowledge by daylight? 

Says Mr. Sears, "We know that they are better off in the mill 
than running wild in the streets and fields, exposed to the dangers 
of growing up into an ignorant, idle, and vicious citizenship." Mr. 
Sears seems to miss the point. He seems to forget that our legis- 
lation is directed simply toward the protection of the freedom of 
children under twelve. In view of this cardinal fact, I may sug- 
gest, in the words of Mr. Sears himself, that his language " seems 
just a little strained." What are the perils of vice " in the fields," 
or even in the streets of our rural South (or even in the streets of 
the model villages of Mr. Nichols and Mr. Sears), for the little 
child under twelve ? 

In attempting to arrive at the "animus" of the appeal of our 
Committee, Mr. Sears seems inclined to attribute our statement to 
" ignorance," or to " mischievous labor agitation," or to " sectional 
hatred." Sectional hatred! And which is the more likely to 
induce that malignant and excuseless passion — the spectacle of 
the attitude of the South toward the capital of Massachusetts, or 
the attitude of the capital of Massachusetts toward the little chil- 
dren of the South ? The fact that these are white children, and 



328 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

that Massachusetts — always solicitous for the negro — should 
be largely indifferent to the fate of our white children, does not 
relieve the situation. Suppose the conditions were reversed, and 
that the mills of Southern men were full of negro children under 
twelve — how quickly and how justly New England would ring 
with denunciation ! 

The fundamental principle of our appeal is not thart Alabama 
is guiltless, or that gentlemen like Mr. Nichols and Mr. Sears 
are intentionally brutal. That would be unjust to them and un- 
just to our own sense of right and truth. Our elementary conten- 
tion is, simply, that the common conscience will hold, and should 
hold, the capital of Massachusetts to the moral and economic 
standards of Massachusetts. Both Mr. Nichols and Mr. Sears 
have admitted that the employment of little children is " wrong " 
from an economic and a humanitarian standpoint. Neither 
gentleman has told us, and no single representative of New 
England investments in Alabama has yet told us, that he is 
ready to join with us to right this wrong by direct and eifective 
legislation. 

But the appeal of our Committee has not been without response. 
We care to indulge in no recriminations for the past. We have 
prayed that, in our approaching struggle. New England will stand 
with us and not against us, for we have no intention whatever of 
seeing her investments here embarrassed by complex and oppres- 
sive labor legislation. Our motives cannot long be misunder- 
stood. For such response as has come to us from the New 
England press, and from many of the people of New England, 
we are sincerely grateful. I close this letter with an expression 
which has just reached me. It is a telegram from Seth Low, the 
Mayor-elect of Greater New York, in reference to our bill now 
pending before the Legislature of the State of Georgia. It reflects 
what we believe will be the real, the ultimate, response of the 
North to the situation at the South. It is as follows : — 

" I am heartily glad to throw whatever influence I can exert, in 
favor of protective legislation for the children of Georgia, strictly 
defining the permitted age and hours of labor in factories, on 
lines of similar legislation in Massachusetts and New York. 
Georgia ought to profit by the experience of other States. She 



APPENDIX B 329 

ought not to pay for her own experience with the lives of her 
children, I say this as one having indirectly an interest in the 
Massachusetts mills in Georgia. 

" Seth Low." 

That is statesmanship, that is religion, that is intersectional 
fraternity, and that is "Education." 

Edgar Gardner Murphy. 
Montgomery, Ala., December 15, a.d. 1901. 

The above correspondence is included in this Appendix 
in order to illustrate the truth that the influence of that sec- 
tion of the country which has the broadest industrial experi- 
ence and the highest industrial standards should be felt — 
within the newer regions of manufacturing enterprise — upon 
the side of humane and wholesome policies. 

A Child-labor Law is now upon the statute books of Ala- 
bama. The bill, as originally proposed, prohibited night 
work for children under sixteen. This bill — at the demand 
of a committee of the manufacturers representing the facto- 
ries of the State — had to be so amended as to permit night 
labor for all children of thirteen years and upward. 

The South has no disposition to evade her own primary re- 
sponsibility for her industrial conditions. She must face, and 
deal with, the problem of her own guilt. But, for the grow- 
ing number of New England stockholders — drawing divi- 
dends from Southern industrial properties — the press and 
pulpit of New England might have, perhaps, a more frequent 
word of earnest and explicit suggestion. One Southern 
State — Georgia — is still without any direct factory legisla- 
tion. In the States in which legislation has been secured 
there is still the task of adequate enforcement. 



APPENDIX C 

JAMES BRYCE, ON THE RELATIONS OF THE 
ADVANCED AND THE BACKWARD RACES 

" Where contact already exists, a further question arises : 
Can the evils incident to it be mitigated through leading the 
Advanced and the Backward races to blend by intermarriage, 
a method slow but sure, and one by which many nations have 
been brought to unity and strength out of elements originally 
hostile ? This is a question which Nature usually answers, 
settling the matter by the attractions or repulsions she im- 
plants. Yet legislation may so far affect it as to make it 
deserve to be pondered by those who are confronted by 
such a problem. 

" We have already noted that races which are near one 
another in physical aspect and structure tend to mix, and 
that the race produced by their mixture is equal or superior 
to either of the progenitors. 

" We have also noted that where races are dissimilar in 
aspect, and especially in colour, one at least is generally 
repelled by the other, so that there is little admixture by 
intermarriage. This is more plainly the case as regards 
whites (especially North European whites) and blacks than 
it is as regards other races. 

"We have been further led to conclude, though more 
doubtfully, for the data are imperfect, that the mixture of 
races very dissimilar, and especially of European whites 
with blacks, tends rather to lower than to improve the 

330 



APPENDIX C 331 

resultant stock. That it should be lower than the higher 
progenitor seems natural. But does it show a marked im- 
provement upon the inferior progenitor ? May not the 
new mixed race stand, not halfway between the two parent 
stocks, but nearer the lower than the higher ? 

" Should this view be correct, it dissuades any attempt to 
mix races so diverse as are the white Europeans and the 
negroes. The wisest men among the coloured people of the 
Southern States of America do not desire the intermarriage 
of their race with the whites. They prefer to develop it as 
a separate people, on its own Hnes, though of course with 
the help of the whites. The negro race in America is 
not wanting in intelligence. It is fond of learning. It has 
already made a considerable advance. It will cultivate self- 
respect better by standing on its own feet than by seeking 
blood alliances with whites, who would usually be of the 
meaner sort. 

" In India, some sections of the native population are equal 
in intellectual aptitude to their European rulers, and may 
pride themselves upon even longer traditions of intellectual 
culture. One cannot call this part of the population a 
Backward race. Yet it does not seem desirable that they 
and the whites should become fused by intermarriage ; nor 
do they themselves appear to desire that result. 

'* The matter ought to be regarded from the side neither 
of the white nor of the black, but of the future of mankind 
at large. Now for the future of mankind nothing is more 
vital than that some races should be maintained at the 
highest level of efficiency, because the work they can do for 
thought and art and letters, for scientific discovery, and for 
raising the standard of conduct, will determine the general 
progress of humanity. If therefore we were to suppose the 
blood of the races which are now most advanced to be 
diluted, so to speak, by that of those most backward, not 
only would more be lost to the former than would be gained 



332 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

to the latter, but there would be a loss, possibly an irrepara- 
ble loss, to the world at large. 

" It may therefore be doubted whether any further mixture 
of Advanced and Backward races is to be desired. In some 
regions, however, that mixture seems probable. Brazil may 
see the Portuguese whites and the blacks blent into one 
after some centuries. The Spaniards of Central and South 
America (except perhaps Uruguay and Argentina, where 
there are very few natives, and Chile) may be absorbed into 
the Indian population, who will have then become a sort of 
Spaniards. In the Far East there may be a great mixing 
of Chinese and Malays, and in Central Africa a further mix- 
ture of the Sudanese Arabs with the negroes. But the 
Teutonic races, as well as the French, seem likely to keep 
their blood quite distinct from all the coloured races, whether 
in Asia, in Africa, or in America. 

" It remains to consider what can be done to minimize 
the evils and reduce the friction which are incident to the 
contact of an Advanced and a Backward race, and which 
may sometimes become more troublesome with the forward 
movement of the latter. 

" On the legal side of this question, one thing is clear. The 
Backward race ought to receive all such private civil rights 
as it can use for its own benefit. It ought to have as full a 
protection in person and property, as complete an access to 
all professions and occupations, as wide a power of entering 
into contracts, as ready an access to the courts, as the more 
advanced race enjoys. The only distinctions should be 
those which may be needed for its own defence against 
fraud, or to permit the continuance of the old customs (so 
far as harmless) to which it clings. This is the policy which 
the Romans followed in extending citizenship over their 
dominions. It has been followed with admirable consistency 
and success by the English in India, as well as by the French 
in Algeria, and by the Americans when they liberated the 



APPENDIX C 333 

slaves during and after the Civil War. It has the two great 
merits of creating a respect for the lower race among the 
higher one, and of soothing the lower one by the feeling that 
in all that touches the rights of private life they are treated 
with strict justice. 

"When we pass to the sphere of politics, more debatable 
questions emerge. Equahty of rights might seem to be 
here also that which is fairest and most likely to make for 
unity and peace. But the Backward race may be really 
unfit to exercise i)olitical power, whether from ignorance, 
or from an indifference that would dispose it to sell its votes, 
or from a propensity to sudden and unreasoning impulses. 
The familiar illustration of the boy put to drive a locomotive 
engine might in some communities be no extreme way of 
describing the risks a democracy runs when the suffrage is 
granted to a large mass of half-civilized men. 

"Those who rule subject races on despotic methods, as 
the Russians rule Transcaucasia and the English India, or 
as the Hispano-American minorities virtually rule the native 
Indians in most of the so-called republics of Central and 
South America, do not realize all the difficulties that arise in 
a democracy. The capital instance is afforded by the his- 
tory of the Southern States since the Civil War. . . . 

..." The moral to be drawn from the case of the South- 
ern States seems to be that you must not, however excellent 
your intentions and however admirable your sentiments, 
legislate in the teeth of facts. The great bulk of the negroes 
were not fit for the suffrage ; nor under the American Fed- 
eral system was it possible (without incurring other grave 
evils) to give them effective protection in the exercise of 
the suffrage. It would, therefore, have been better to post- 
pone the bestowal of this dangerous boon. True it is that 
rocks and shoals were set thick round every course : true 
that it is easier to perceive the evils of a course actually 
taken than to realize other evils that might have followed 



334 THE PRESENT SOUTH 

some other course. Nevertheless, the general opinion of 
dispassionate men has come to deem the action taken in 
A.D. 1870 a mistake. 

" The social relations of two races which cannot be fused 
raise problems even more difficult, because incapable of 
being regulated by law. Law may attempt to secure equal 
admission to public conveyances or public entertainments. 
But the look of scorn, the casual blow, the brutal oath 
thrown at one who dare not resent it — these are injuries 
which cannot be prevented where the sentiment of the 
dominant race allows them. Impunity corrupts the ordi- 
nary man ; and even the better sort suffer from the con- 
sciousness of their own superiority, not merely in rank, but 
also in strength and volition. One must have lived among 
a weaker race in order to realize the kind of irritation which 
its defects produce in those who deal with it, and how temper 
and self-control are strained in resisting temptations to harsh 
or arbitrary action. It needs something more than the virtue 
of a philosopher — it needs the tenderness of a saint to pre- 
serve the same courtesy and respect towards the members 
of a backward race as are naturally extended to equals. 

. . . "The tremendous problem presented by the Southern 
States of America, and the likelihood that similar problems 
will have to be solved elsewhere, as, for instance, in South 
Africa and the Philippine Isles, bid us ask. What should be 
the duty and the policy of a dominant race where it cannot 
fuse with a backward race? Duty and policy are one, for 
it is equally to the interest of both races that their relations 
should be friendly. 

" The answer seems to be that as regards political rights, 
race and blood should not be made the ground of discrimi- 
nation. Where the bulk of the coloured race are obviously 
unfit for political power, a qualification based on property 
and education might be estabhshed which should permit 
the upper section of that race to enjoy the suffrage. Such 



APPENDIX C 335 

a qualification would doubtless exclude some of the poorest 
and most ignorant whites, and might on that ground be re- 
sisted. But it is better to face this difficulty than to wound 
and alienate the whole of the coloured race by placing them 
without the pale of civic functions and duties." 

See the Romanes Lecture, igo2 : The Relations of the 
Advanced and the Backtvard Races of Mankind. By James 
Bryce, D.C.L., Honorary Fellow of Oriel and Trinity Col- 
leges. Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, June 
7, ig02. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, ig02. 



CONGRESS 



